Frank writes...
Sunday was a short day at IRM for me but I still got some noticeable work done. The primary goal was to paint the right side of the 18 from the belt rail down and aft of the doors.
Thanks to Zach for getting this photo of me in action with the trim roller.
Here's the final result. This side of the car, which conveniently is the side seen by the public walking through Barn 7, now wears fresh Bankers Grey paint for most of its length. I still need to do most of the rear end (you can see a bit of the recently-applied Bondo in this photo), the doors, the panel between the doors, and of course the letterboard and window posts. I also brought over the four most recently-painted windows. One of them was lightly wider than the others and I wasn't able to get it into the car, but it came out of the car (at a different slot) so I just need to fiddle with that. The other three got installed on the car's left side. Speaking of Zach, this was his project for the day. The headlights on the 749 stopped working during night operations on Memorial Day Weekend, so the car's headlight resistor box was removed and brought into the shop. The fault was traced not to a resistor but to one of the wires, so that's good. We won't be so lucky when it comes time to repair the 319's headlight resistor box, which has a couple of resistors that failed. I should probably start working on that sooner rather than later...
5 comments:
The new paint has dramatically improved the appearance of the car. Keep it up!
Is that headlight resistor from the 749 the original design or has it been modernized from the original grid bank style?
C Kronenwetter
Charlie- Headlight resistors are not made as grids; the resistance needed is too large for a cast iron grid. Instead they are made like this, with spiral porcelain tubes wound with small-gauge resistive wire. It takes all eight tubes in this thing to provide the roughly 160 ohms needed. This box is the original style for the car, to my knowledge.
R. W. Schauer
And a post from last September has a good picture of a box from a CA&E car:
https://hickscarworks.blogspot.com/2020/09/house-call.html
The type from 319 is less common, with the wire wound into a small spiral first before being wound in large spirals on the porcelains. This is how the car heaters are (were) usually constructed. (Enclosed "Chromalox" strip heaters became more common later on.) You can see the big disadvantage of this method; when the wire breaks it tends to fly off the porcelains until it contacts the grounded case, and then you have more problems. Sometimes a heat-resistant string was threaded through all of the coils of the small spirals, to keep it in place.
R. W. Schauer
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