Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Brake, Broke, Broken

We had a few visitors out at the Museum today, including two members of Seashore, Don Landry and Gary Jenness. They rode along with me while I was pulling the wood cars out to put the 319 over the pit, and helped with switches and so on.

Bob has just finished lettering his latest project, the URTX reefer, and here he stands proudly in front of it.


I wanted to install two new brake shoes on the #2 truck. After some work, one of them is now in place, but the other one just will not fit. They are thicker than the ones I removed.


On the left, we see a slack adjuster. I can't get any farther away, so this is the best I can do. The arrows point to two hooks for supporting the slack adjuster when it's removed. I had never actually done this before. In order to get more clearance for inserting the new brake shoes, I removed the pins for the slack adjuster and let it down, but it still cannot be removed. After a while, with some help from Vic and Henry, progress was made, but not quite enough. That was rather frustrating. So I red-tagged the car and left it on the pit. I'll attack it again first thing Saturday. Now that it's a public nuisance, perhaps I can get some more help.

Or I could just quit in disgust and find a new hobby. Maybe tropical fish?

2 comments:

Kirk Warner said...

It looks like the slack adjuster needs to be soaked in diesel fuel to free up the adjustment threads. That might lossen the lock nuts and the slack adjuster.

Randall Hicks said...

Kirk: It's not obvious from the pictures, but you cannot actually remove the adjuster from the truck without detaching one of the hangers. I was able to move the lock nuts some more, and it is now back together.