D&S Mechanics Visit COMO March 22-25

Much was accomplished on the Durango and Silverton Mechanics visit to Como March 22-25. Several projects are chronicled below.

The X-ray of the boiler repairs has been completed.  Long story short:  we have a very boring set of film to look at in the Form 4 packet.  Boring because the welds were nearly perfect.  It passed with flying colors.  Here’s a picture of one of the films of the welds:

Next great bit of progress:  the brackets for the tube sheet braces are fully installed.  The braces get pinned to these brackets, and then attached to the boiler shell, once we are positive that they won’t be in our way for doing any other work in the boiler.   

If it is not clear how the dry pipe/header will fit together, here’s a picture of those two pieces and you can imagine the ball portion of the dry pipe end socketing into the header, and it all gets tightened with the studs to be steam tight (but also able to wiggle around a little in the socket while remaining steam tight). This is why doing the throttle body and dry pipe machining outside of the locomotive makes so much sense.  We will essentially have a similar connection when D&S arrives here for installation so all we will have to do is bolt it together in Como, instead of lap them in place through the steam dome.

We thought the fireman’s water glass connection looked ok, but it seemed really odd how it was welded.  We decided to cut it off and we are glad we did, because we found that the fitting we thought looked OK was actually just stuck inside the original Baldwin threads, and not fully welded per any code.  The good news is that the original Baldwin threads remained intact underneath, so we should be able to clean those threads and fix that ourselves.  You can see the threads under those cut away globs of weld.  It’s a mystery as to why they didn’t just use the threads in the first place.

The oil firing valve bracket got a little more machining to fit around the fireman side water glass valve.  We are particularly pleased with how nicely the machining came out on that.  The chamfered edges is a particularly classy touch. 

The Regal Lathe is back in service with its new VFD.  Taking apart the old rotary switch proved that the previous VFD failure was the result of the old rotary switch shorting out internally for some reason, so that has been eliminated.. Here’s a movie of Jordan Green (D&S) turning some bolts into transfer punches (that little point on the end) for the T-brace installation.

Having the mill again proved really valuable on site.    Here’s Jordan using it to bore out the dry pipe end about 5 thousands of an inch to barely slip over the longer dry pipe section.