To the cheers of the mighty throngs gathered to witness the momentous event, the saddle was welded to its support, thus rendering the cylinder block substantially complete! Well, actually it was just me watching Ed weld the pieces together but it still felt like a big event!
Yes, we are talking smokebox, boiler and all kinds of neat things like that. But, it was only through some literal heavy lifting that we were able to get to this point. Since it was time to weld the saddle onto the cylinder block, the smokebox needed to be constructed so that it could be mounted on the saddle and in turn, the saddle could be welded in place while keeping the smokebox in perfect position and alignment.
The heavy lifting occured in trying to find the pipe from which to make the smokebox. Although Ed's pipe supplies have dwindled due to his recycling efforts, there were still a bunch of pipes to sort through to find what was needed. Ed decided that we would make the boiler out of 12" ID pipe and the smokebox out of 12" OD pipe. Once I found a chunk of the correct sized pipe and after removing the old wasp nests and cobwebs, I had to muscle it over into the bandsaw to cut it to length. After a lengthy period in the sandblaster, it came out looking respectible.
Since Vic then happened to wander by the shop (to continue work on his beautiful working figure-8 rotating headlight for his GS-4), we decided to use his additional man-power to cut out the boiler. We wrestled a 7' long piece of pipe over to the bandsaw and chopped it to its 63" length. Including the almost 2' length of the smokebox, the entire boiler assembly is going to be about 8' long. What a monster!
After a bunch more welding, it was time to disassemble the block for probably (hopefully!) the final time. The heads were temporarily installed on the cylinders and the rest of the holes were plugged and taped up. I then bead blasted all the parts to remove all of the accumulated rust so we could put a coat of paint on the interior, hard-to-get-to places. The camera was acting up (operator error, of course) so I didn't get any pictures of where we are at.
2 years ago
