Sunday update

Frank writes...

Sunday was another productive day, though there were slightly fewer people in the shop than usual. A couple of the regulars were out of town, while Nick, Greg, and Jack spent the entire day out on the railroad, moving line hardware from the old line poles to the recently-installed replacement poles.

As for me, my first job was to finish tracing the lettering on the 453. I ordered another roll of Mylar during the week and this allowed me to trace AURORA, AND, and two separate instances of the car number off of the sides of the car. I still want to lay out all of my tracings in the wood shop and make sure that there aren't any characters we're missing parts from - if so, it will be time to break out the sandpaper to recover the missing sections - but we're in pretty good shape.

After that, it was time to work a bit more on that 3D printed latch for the 309 that showed up in the mail a couple of weeks ago. After confirming that these use a 5/16-18 thread, Richard located the bottoming taps and we cut threads into the thing. It seems that the material is strong enough to hold, but our plan when we order a couple more of these is to have the 3D hole printed (er, not printed?) hexagonal so that we can epoxy a nut into the hole. That way we won't have to worry about the threads collapsing.

Richard also found some special "plastic primer" designed for bonding to plastic products. So here's the latch, all ready for Washington blue.

From Wheaton to Kinsbury Run - it's time to head over to Shaker Heights 18. Many thanks to Bill Wulfert, who on Saturday finished spray-painting the inside of the front end sign box. A little bit of touch-up may be needed but this is a big improvement. Once I'm done with the touch-up, the sign can go back in and this little project will be done. Thanks, Bill!

Mainly I wanted to work on removing the glass from the side sign box over the car's exit door. The glass in this box was broken before we got the car, as shown, so that's not very presentable. The only way to get the glass out is to remove the metal frame on the outside of the car. It appeared that the screws holding the frame in were a mixture of threaded in and bolted, so Bill and I had been putting Kroil on the nuts visible from inside the box.

Once in a blue moon a job turns out to be easier than expected, and this was just such a case: it turned out that the screws holding the frame in were brass, hence not rusted solid. So with just a little bit of persuasion it came out nicely. There was a lot of glazing putty around this thing, so I'll clean up the frame (and, while it's vented to the outdoors, the inside of the sign box) and prime and paint it. As you can see, the steel around the doors will also need to be needle-chipped at some point, and the letterboard will need to be stripped. All in good time.

Here's our sign box window frame. I took it back to the shop, wire-wheeled it clean, and primed it. I'll need to cut a 29-3/8"x5-3/4" piece of 1/8" glass which will hopefully be straightforward.

Just before dinnertime I also sprayed the inside of the second "tin can" tail light housing silver, and painted the two cast rings from that same tail light Bankers Grey. So the spray booth in the lean-three is now festooned with CA&E and Shaker Heights stuff.

As mentioned previously, Nick, Greg, and Jack were out on the railroad all day working on DC Line Department stuff. Richard (when he wasn't being pestered by me for help with the 18) was working on repairing switches for CTA trolley buses and diagnosing a suspension issue with our new Janesville bus. Jeron was around but I'm not sure what he was working on. A few people from the steam, diesel, passenger car, and track departments made brief appearances. And Tim stopped by to show off some of what he found cleaning out behind the old baseboards in the 50th Avenue station. A business card from Adolph Bloch at Lake and Halsted, a Borden's Milk sticker, and a Union Workman Smoke Chew label. I wonder exactly how old some of these are.