Wednesday, February 22, 2017

You'll Be Seeing Red

Red has a huge number of possible shades and hues, and matching it can be quite difficult, depending upon the lighting and viewing angle, etc.  I think I finally have a good match for the external color on the 319, which is what we'll want for the final coats in the vestibules.  In this picture, it's the middle part of the trim piece; the rest of it was a previous version of red.  After a couple of tries, it looks pretty good to me.


The weather today was good for painting.   Here's the ceiling of the left side:


And on the right side, over the motorman's position:


And the electrical cabinet door section:


Well, that was almost blinding, wasn't it?  I didn't spend much time over at Barn 4, but here's an interesting view of a couple of new helpers.

Assisting Norm and Jeff on the 28 are two volunteers who are welders at the Belvidere Chrysler plant.  They're temporarily laid off while the plant is being retooled, so they're helping put together a different kind of car so their skills don't get rusty.  Sorry, I should have written down their names.   Maybe next time.


Here a new section of steel plate is getting a test fit.



In the morning, we had a Car Dept. meeting for the Wednesday crew, and discussed upcoming projects.  There are several relatively minor items that need to be addressed on some of the streetcars, such as 972, 141, 144, etc. and we talked about wheels for the 68 and other such things.  For my cars, we are probably going to need to have some new motor axle bearings cast, and we talked about what needs to be done to create a pattern.  Frank Sirinek knows a place that may be able to cast bearings, so he'll help by talking to them.  This could be expensive, so we might start begging for money.

And then speaking of wheels, here are a couple of North Shore wheelsets from the recently acquired spare trucks.   As was pointed out at the meeting, you do NOT want to try rolling individual wheelsets over the pit: they can easily start angling to one side and wind up falling straight down.   That wouldn't get good.  This has been today's public service announcement.

5 comments:

Nick Gawriluk said...

Randy/Frank,

I recently was going through my photo collection and stumbled upon a good deal of pictures taken at Wheaton of the CAE. This were black and white photos that were hand colored by a graphic artist. Would you be interested in seeing and possibly posting?

Nick

Anonymous said...

It appears that THI&E car 53 is the only one in the collection missing Baldwin trucks. Might it receive the set from Ex NSL 154? That might be a nice arch window interurban to get running.

Randall Hicks said...

Sorry, but the 53 is the one that was scrapped a couple of years ago.

Charles Brown said...

I take it that the 154 has been scrapped?

Randall Hicks said...

The 154 is now down to the steel carbody, and nearly everything of any possible use has been removed. I'm told that one of the members of the museum at Grass Lake, who essentially paid for the car, is planning to move the body to his farm.