Yet More Grids

Frank writes...

I was back to working on grids Sunday.  The current round is due to the 308 grid failure last week; although the box with the faulty grid has had a temporary repair installed that will permit the car to operate normally, in the long term it is better to replace the failed grid element.  So, rather than take the box off of the car for disassembly, I decided to build a new box that we can swap with the one on the car in short order.  This way the 308 won't be out of service while we're putting together the new box.

I started with the above box, which had been removed from the 309 back in 2013.  This box had had a couple of different failures and fixes and it had been replaced by a box built new in the shop from parts and had been stored in Barn 8 since.

The old 309 box came apart fairly easily.  In addition to the box frame and grid elements there's a lot of mica insulation in these; the mica washers are plentiful in our storage car but the same is not true of the mica tubes.  On this box, one of the three mica tubes was good, one was pretty bad and one was marginal, so either way we'll need to try and locate at least one or two.  The Charles City Western guys found a source for this a couple of years ago so we'll see if we can put in an order.  Anyway, I needle-chipped and wire wheeled the end castings and through rods for the frame but I didn't have any primer handy so they were left in the Lean-Three next to our third rail beams.  I also found the necessary grids in our grid storage area and cleaned up the contact faces on those.  Once the box components are primed and painted black - and once we can find another mica tube or two - the new box will be assembled and put on the 308.

There was plenty of other work going on.  Norm and Jeff (shown above) were working on the Michigan car as usual.  Here they are fitting new rain gutters for the rear platform side doors; later Jeff was in the shop working on making up a set of drawings for replacement door posts for the baggage doors.  Work on the roof is rapidly coming to a close and moving to the front platform, where a good deal of steel work needs to be done.

And then there was the crew working on pulling one of the trucks out from under Sand Springs 68.  Above, Joel (red shirt), Richard (white shirt) and Greg (blue shirt) wheel the truck out from under the car, later to be replaced by a Taylor shop truck.  Rod was also there running the forklift.  I'm not sure exactly what the plan is for the 68 but its wheels need work of some sort.