Sunday report

Frank writes...

The big news from Sunday was that Tim, who generously offered to install new rattan on our bench seat for the 18, has been making his usual rapid progress. The bench seat had already acquired a coat of finish paint and a layer of canvas, as shown below. Exciting news!

I spent part of my afternoon sanding more windows on the 415, and got about half of the remaining ones done, including the end windows at both ends of the car. The 415 is shown below in its current spot just west of the pit. That "busted lip" is a missing dasher panel, removed to iron out some dents and also replace some of the deteriorated wood blocking supporting it.

I also did some sanding and epoxying of the two 18 windows that are currently in the shop, shown below along with a side window out of the 415 that itself required some epoxy repair.

So what else is happening in the shop? Well, Tim continues to make progress on the doors for the 1808. Below, he uncovered the original ACF painted-on builder's "plate" on one of the doors. ACF was a conglomeration of several smaller predecessor companies, and in the early 1900s they had plants in several different cities. Apparently our car was built in Jeffersonville, Ind., which was the Ohio Falls Car Manufacturing Company plant before ACF was formed in 1899. Pretty neat.

And below, you may remember from last fall that Doodlebug Bob was working on building a fixture that would allow us to machine the dome-topped journal wedges fitted to North Shore cars. Well, the first journal wedge has now been machined successfully by Bob, and here it is. You can't really see the arched top of this thing from the photo, but it's obvious in person. And in addition, Joel, Greg, and Nick E were all out and working on various department projects, plus we had drop-in visits from Phil, Marcus, Gregg, Jeff, and Tom.