Sunday, June 28, 2015

ping pong floor

Hi everyone,
Well, due to a huge Historical Society meeting at the Garden City Historical Society, I had to miss Saturdays volunteer session. I understand that work continued on the M1 simulator program and it is fully integrated now.
But as for yesterday, Brooke took care of finishing up the installation of the door sweeps and then sanded down the entry way into #50 and laid a coat of polyurethane down on the entire floor.

I had set up Mike and Paul to both needle scale the front of #397 dinky.
by the end of the day, it was complete and primed.
We will continue to do 2 parts at a time as manpower can handle. If we can get 2 people a session, I feel #397 can be completed by the end of fall. Yes, that's all body work. paint stripping and painting.

The biggest part of the session for me was to remove some of the rotten concrete on the floor of the Ping Pong coach. I broke up an area from the rear door going inside just to the edge of the bathroom door frame.
Most of the floor is a red color and that is just a skim coat of self leveling concrete that covers the original concrete. The actual flooring in the original floor was 9 by 9 composition tile over concrete. The concrete was poured on top of corrugated steel. This is the same way that most roads and bridges are put together, except, they use stainless steel corrugated panels.
Due to the corrosion of the concrete on the plain corrugated steel throughout the years, the floor is coming apart and will need to be completely taken off the car. What Leon and I did was to mix up some self leveling concrete and pour this onto the solid concrete on top of the corrugated steel.
We will need to pour a 2nd level next time to build up the floor so it will not be a tripping hazard.
The link below is to the picture I took.
ping pong floor

until next time-----

Gary

Monday, June 1, 2015

a little late but still good news

Hi all,
It's been 3 work sessions in for me and I haven't been posting. Getting old I guess.
Anyway,
While some were toiling on the continued restoration of #35's cab-Others were hard at work building a new ramp and staircase onto our M1 simulator. The last Saturday was spent finishing up the woodwork, staircase and the painting. This past Saturday was spent touching up the paint.
I, of course was also working. We have been hampered in our efforts to control a major water leak into the Worlds Fair Alco cab and have determined that it was coming in from the door frame of entry door.
We worked diligently to move the door striker as far forward as we could to bring the actual door closer to the frame. Then we had to wait until it rained to observe the water marks. The job we did worked a little,  but not 100%. So we then figured it was still getting behind the door frame and finally had to bite the bullet and well an angle iron onto the front of the door against the frame.
Since it had not rained from the day I welded in the angle until today, I had no way to measure the outcome of this addition.
If all holds out well for the rain over the next 2 days, I can go up on Wednesday night to see if the new piece kept the water out. If so,  I will spend the next session re- painting the cab.
Keep your fingers crossed !!
This past Saturday saw us finishing up the painting of the Ping Pong truck frames. There are bronze-like plaques attached to the trucks showing the  number of the axle as well as information for the center pins. The #3 axle plaque is missing.
We took the time to needle scale these plaques and I painted them a bright red color. After this color dried I went over the raised letters in bright yellow for contrast against the red and the black of the trucks.
Prototypical, it aint! I don't care; it looks very cool. Next week I will make some touch ups to the red & yellow to complete the task. While needle scaling the air tanks, we came across what appears to be the original green color that the undercarriage was probably painted. A dark green. NOT Brunswick green, but a noticeable green color.
We also began to remove the cut levers and the hand rails on the rear of Dinky #397, the blue and grey unit.
If we can get them all off, it would make our lives easier to needle scale the unit and get all of the weld seams ground down to allow body work to begin.
We would like to get this unit completed this season. It looks like we only need a few more pieces welded on/in to complete the metal work.

As for #35's cab restoration, it continues unabated, however as is our style, we ran out of welding gas during this past Saturdays session and had to cut short the job being done.
Steve Nappy & Ronnie now have the cab even more square than it has ever been.
If their pace continues and we don't run out of supplies, AGAIN!!!!I can see them achieving their goal of completion for this year.

Keep the faith
Gary

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

1st posting of 2015

It's only Tuesday the 6th, yet for those of you who did not see it, we made Newsday this past Sunday.
Thanks Bill Bleier-I hope I spelled that right.
Go to our facebook page to read the entire article.
Also, I received an email today from our curator Josh Stoff. He was able to get a generator to hook up to our steam engine. This ought to be a hoot! We are making arrangements to pick it up at the Cradle of Aviation.
Gary