Thursday, July 15, 2010

319 Report

It was another hot one today. One has to be careful not to work too hard.

The first thing to do was to take a hike through the Great Southwest Desert and check on the 321. The clamps I've installed already seem to be holding up well, so that's good news. The tarp seems to have stopped shifting. I cut off another excess acre or so of tarp and attached some more of the clamps provided by Joel. Thanks again!

Now that the scaffold is in place, I was able to finish painting the roof black, as seen here. Unfortunately the scaffold is in the way of the camera. I hope the fresh paint will quickly acquire enough dust to match the rest of the roof!

Joel also made up three new trolley ropes for me, and I replaced the one on the 309, as mentioned earlier. I think I'll wait until the rope guards are installed to put new ropes on the 319; I may be able to start on that this Saturday.

Then I installed the six remaining handrails, as seen here. There's still a couple of holes to redrill, and of course they need to be touched up, especially the screw heads. But they look good.

Then the brake rigging. I was able to reposition both top rods so there is less piston travel. Standing travel in service is now 6", which is still a little more than desired, but a noticeable improvement.



Tim Peters is hard at work on the 1797, as seen here. He is hoping to have it moved into Barn 4 soon so he'll have more room to work. Both ends are being stripped in preparation for body and fender.










And it looks like Barn 9 now has a vistadome section!

4 comments:

Scott Greig said...

What's the story on the roof being off of Barn 9? I had a friend in town from NY over the weekend and he asked me about it.

Anonymous said...

I think it is time for a new roof. The old one has had problems and patches. The contractor is starting at the south end, and there are rolls of some fluffy material going under the new metal panels. It is not thick enough to provide much in the way of insulation, so must be for some other purpose. AND - they are installing sidelights at the eave lines, removing the troublesome plastic roof panels.

Bob Kutella

Frank Hicks said...

For fans of the "L" I would point out something interesting in the photo of Tim on the end of the 1797 which he e-mailed me. Note that just over his left ear is an orange stripe with brown above it. It seems that when the 1797 was rebuilt in 1938 it got an unusual (unique?) livery where the entire end of the car was brown, with orange stripes carried around the end at the letterboard and belt rail only. The end windows, like the side windows, were brown. I think he's planning on restoring it to its 1938 condition complete with this color scheme.

Scott Greig said...

I wouldn't be so quick to say that 1797 will be going into service in that experimental scheme...at last report we haven't yet determined if the car went into service in that scheme, or if it was repainted into the more familiar form of CRT brown and orange first.