Filling the Gaps

 I've been on vacation in Arizona the past two weeks, and we spent Thanksgiving with our children and grandchildren.  The weather was great, there was plenty of food...  It's a tough life, but somebody's got to handle it.  And it might as well be me.

Anyway, it's back to work at IRM.  First, let's take a tour around the shop and see what other people have been doing on their projects during the blog break.

Tim was there and continues to work on fabricating the new walls for the new ticket office in the 50th Ave. station.

There are two different assemblies.  This is the larger one.

And Bill Wulfert was there, working on various parts as usual.  Here is the gear assembly for a roll sign.

These must be new motors for the Toronto CLRV.  They have months and years stenciled on them to represent their most recent overhaul, I would suppose.

Then I see that John Sheldon has been working on window post assemblies.  Several of them were rotted out at the sill, and have been expertly patched.  Nice!

And this is another door for the 160, if my psychic powers are working, repainted by Pete Galayda.

I spent the day working on the roof of the 453, of course.  The remaining gaps, one at each end. are getting much closer to completion.  First, I started work on fitting a new piece of poplar to the gap at the southeast corner where the tack molding had rotted away. With the wood gone, it looks like this:

The replacement piece required the use of the company router, the sander, and the big bandsaw, and after a lot of fitting it looked like this:

A second piece had to be formed and glued on, to fill in the gap between the top of the first piece and the actual roof:

The bottom trim I will need to work on at home, but it's otherwise about ready for installation.

And at the southwest corner, the new pieces of molding that were epoxied in place last time were nice and solid, so I was able to nail the remaining curved roof boards into place.

And the gaps were filled with epoxy.  

Next time I will belt-sand it down, make any further patches as needed, and then it can be painted.  When covered with canvas, it should look fine.  So this roof job is going along pretty well.

And speaking of filling the gaps, we'll close with the usual public service announcement:  the Happy Holiday Railway Light Experience will be running again this weekend, so if you're anywhere near the campus, be sure to drive over and see it!  Check the website for details (link above).  You may never see something like this again!