Hello all, and thank you for joining us for another update. This week we’ve been able to finish the Shock High, made a start at clearing the Tube down and got the doors finished on B763305.
When Dave inspected the Shock High, he picked up that the underkeep bolts on the West side had no split pins in the bolts. Ernie and Charlie undid the bolts, removed the spring washers and put split pins in the holes which makes this wagon ready to release.
Nick and I went to finish off the doors on B763305. First job was the make them so they can be opened. The door chain rail has been replaced in the van’s life and it needed some adjustment to be able to lift it to clear the new doors. Part of this involved re-fixing the roof sheet between the door chain rail and it’s metal capping strip as we’ve done with more recent vans.
Ernie then finished off re-tapping a vacuum cylinder piston where the top cap had rusted and broken and sheared one of the bolts.
I measured up the back of the doors for their diagonal bracing. While not strictly necessary with us building the door from plywood, it completes the look of door externally. Dave and I cut them and then fitted them with some help from Charlie. Ernie and Nick then went down and painted the door into the traditional bauxite gloss.
Dan Baldwin went to B854782 and did some signwriting on one of the panels we’d replaced earlier in the year.
Team Baldwin and Dan deployed to the LNER Tube, needle gunning,scraping, cleaning and priming the tops of the solebars. Ernie was also on the needle gun, cleaning up the areas where plates were mounted on 1802.
Dave and I struck up the Test Car after fixing the radiator back down, attempting a air brake test after we swapped the distributor back onto the coach last week. The brakes worked more as expected, however the compressor in the coach was struggling to over come the leaking air brake cylinder. We also hadn’t swapped back the choke plate between the distributor and the spare so Dave did that while I started to remove the leaking cylinder.
With the cylinder off the coach and clamped to one of the orange trolleys, we stripped down the cylinder to see why it was blowing by. The manuals say to use some threaded bar to prevent the cap of the cylinder being fired across the work site The inside of the cylinder was liberally coated with oily/greasy schmoo. The seal has clearly been sat in it as it has swelled up, which explains the lack of movement and why I fell down when I removed it. The level of contamination is a concern for the rest of the coaches air system, so we’ll likely have to remove the other cylinder and flush out the air system, including back flushing the gauges in the coach. We’ll have to try and find a replacement seal for the brake cylinder and get that rebuilt
That probably marks the end for that pair of overalls, or at the very least that’d upset my washing machine tremendously! That wraps up our weekend, thanks for reading. Join us again next week to find out what we get up to!
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