A wee tad nippy today

When I arrived before 8am, it was COLD!
Not wasting any time and trying to keep warm, I opened up the shop and trailer to get the forklift key and gas tank. I proceeded to start up and warm up the folrklift to move the air compressor down the yard to the area behind the Worlds Fair cab.
After chaining up the air compressor to the forklift, I s-l-o-w-l-y inched my way across the yard to park the compressor in front of the WF Cab and drove the forklift back to its resting place behind the parts trailer. When Paul & Leon arrived, they helped me to push the unit back up aginst the fence behind the WF cab.
We then brought over the air tools and set up the compressor to needlescale the drive wheels. When Ronnie, Ricky, Evan and Gerard showed up we broke the team apart to finish up the priming of #35's frame and needlescaling of the drivers.
FYI-as of 5:30 pm yesterday, Saturday 10-6-10:the entire frame of #35 save for the front pilot area and the cylinders have been stripped of everything and primed. I will be writing notes back onto the primer for our rebuilder to  see.

Also when we finished up, we had totally stripped and primed all 3 sets of drivers-YEAH for us!!!!!
1 more goal accomplished-2 more yet to go.

When Scott Lindsey came up earlier this year to set up the tesing phase, he showed me that there was a lip and a groove behind the drive wheels where the tire overlapped the actual wheels.
This area, if left untouched, holds alot of crud which would hold moisture up against the spokes of the wheel and this crud would help the moisture to eat away at the wheel, so it was VERY importrant that we clean out this crud from this area.
Using the needles of the needlescaling guns, this job took less than an hour for all 6 wheels and was easily accomplished while we were taking off the paint & rust off  from the back side of the wheels.
Since we had enough hands we were able to trade off jobs while keeping all of the guns going. Even though we ran out of fuel at the end of the day, we finished up and primed every bare piece of the wheels.

For the next few weeks, we will be focusing on taking the tender trucks down to bare metal, priming them and putting tarps over them to protect them from the weather. At the same time, we will also be putting all 6 of the driver bearing boxes together. It sounds a lot easier than it really is as these boxes appear to be only 2 parts. The outer box which has the bearing face and the inner box.
It's this inner box that also holds about 8 more parts to hold the grease cellars, spring plates and a few small parts together.
Even though these parts are "supposed" to be interchangeable, remember the adge that interchangeable parts-dont!
They DO take a "set" to them and these parts will really only fit a specific box, so 6 outer boxes  and 6 inner boxes and 6 assemblies to fit into the inner boxes!!!!
Thankfully, when these boxes were first taken apart, the smaller parts were kept together  in separate milk crates so we only have to deal with the 2 bigger parts being fitted together.

While this was all going on, John and I were working on an interview for Newsday and had some photos taken of us working.

I am still waiting to see a comment from anyone!!!
Gary