Sunday update

Frank writes...

It was a quiet day in the car shop on Sunday; most of the regulars were out of town, so the only people there were Tim, Doodlebug Bob, and myself.

I'd been hoping to do some more Bondo work on the 18, but Saturday temperatures in the 60s turned into Sunday temperatures in the 30s so I elected to skip it. But I did manage to accomplish something I'd wanted to do at some point, namely remove one of the 18's brake shoes. We will need to replace one or two of these, but they're a very weird design that's held to the brake head by a pair of cotter pins rather than the usual flat bar keeper. After comparing this with other brake shoes we have in stock, I came to the conclusion that we don't have anything that we could reasonably modify. So that means we'll need to look into getting some of these cast. Oh, joy. We'll let you know how progress goes on that. For what it's worth, this shoe appeared to have a casting number of M3386 or maybe M3336.

I also pulled two more windows out of the 18, brought them into the shop, and stripped the paint off of their exteriors. They're shown here following a bit of epoxy repair. Next week these will get sanded and primed. I was going to put a coat of finish paint on the previous two subjects but ran out of time. However we're quite close to having all of the windows on the door side of the car (and a handful on the blind side, so far) repainted.

And this is exciting - a huge Thank You to Buzz and Bill for providing invaluable help with the project to replace the 18's third roll sign. Buzz has procured a vinyl mask, shown here, which we will be able to use to paint our own roll sign. And Bill came up with a roll of book-binding material, which we have successfully used on recent roll sign replacement projects. So the next step will be to cut the material to size, then mask and paint it. This sign goes in the little sign box over the front (entrance) door to the car.

I'm not sure how new this news is, but it appeared that some progress has been made on reassembling the second truck for the Cleveland PCC.

And it doesn't look like much, but Tim pointed out that this crummy wooden cabinet is slightly historically significant. It's the last of the "furniture" that Ray Neuhaus had in the various wooden 'L' cars when most of them were full of shelves, parts, workroom accoutrement, and other stuff. But every 'L' car that dates back to North Chicago days is now either fully restored or - in the case of the final car, the 1808 - in the shop for restoration. So Tim carted this out to the dumpster.