Chilly Sunday

Frank writes...

Sunday was quite a bit colder than Saturday, with temperatures in the high single digits (that's around -14 C for our metrically minded readers), but there was a sizeable crew out and a lot got done.

Once we got the heat and lights turned on mid-afternoon following completion of heat system work (see below), I was able to make progress on seats. Above we have the two seats that were completed. The one in the right foreground had its back installed last week, but there was a sheared-off bolt in the frame that was preventing it from rotating correctly. The seat behind it was completely redone today and went more quickly than the others have gone; hopefully it's a harbinger of things to come!

Here's a view taken before that first photo showing work in progress on the seat. Most visible parts of the seat frame - the plated tubing, armrests, cushions, and back - are the "movable" part of the frame. This is connected to the stationary part of the frame, the part bolted to the floor and wall, with just two vertical bolts through the middle, which go into a rotating mechanism. One of the bolts had sheared off, so I had to extract it, find and cut down a replacement, and reinstall everything. Thanks to Richard for his help with this. 

We're now up to six seats done and 21 to go, though two of the ones that have been done still need the final machine screw driven in (some of the originals are pretty goofed up; replacements screws are due any day).

For those following along at home, other than the bulkhead seats, which will be a bit more of a challenge because the frame needs to be unbolted from the car to remove the seat back, we've got all but one of the seats on the R side (top, in this image) of the main compartment done.

Besides seat mechanism repair and seat back replacement, the 460 Improvement Society was hard at work on getting the car's heat working better. Jimmy, shown above, was helped by Greg, Richard, and Good Nick in working to repair the heat in the 460's smoker. The main compartment heat (which is on a separate circuit) worked fine, but it turned out that the coil that closes the contactor for the smoker heat had failed. Jimmy removed the working contactor from the 453 and used that to replace the one in the 460, though he also needed to swap resistors. We're going to try to replace the resistor and send the coil out to get repaired, so when attention inevitably turns to the 453, the smoker heat contactor should be working quite nicely!

In other news, Norm, Zach and others were working on inspecting motors on the Electroliner. One thing they wanted to do was cut down the brushes, which had been cut far too long when the motors were rebuilt. This is not ideal. Above is part of the pile of brush cutoffs created by this operation; remember, there are eight traction motors on that thing! Other than this minor issue, and the need to replace a wire inside the #2 motor, no significant issues were found.

When I arrived, I found that Nathan had been hard at work getting the HVAC in the new lean-to extension working and had succeeded in that quest. As such, the sliding door that used to open out onto the parking lot has now been removed so that the new extension is open to the old shop.

Nathan himself was hard at work installing acoustic tile in the room at the east end of the lean-to extension. By the end of the day, that entire upper wall had acoustic panels screwed into place over the sheet metal.

In other news, Ashton was working on stripping paint in the cab of ComEd 4 in preparation for an interior paint job; the 'Liner crew was working on the interior restoration project; and, at the end of the day, Zach, Mikey, and others switched the Electroliner back over to Barn 7 and put ComEd 4, which had also been on the inspection pit track, back in its usual spot in Barn 6.