It's been about ten years since I made any third-rail beams for CA&E cars, so now seemed like a good time to get back to work. We will eventually need four more sets of four each, for the 409 and the three St. Louis cars. All of them will be 6' long. (Fun fact: third rail beams are all exactly 12" shorter than the truck wheelbase.) And so we'll need wood. In the past I used white oak, but since that time I have learned that the railroad used maple, and since oak has recently skyrocketed in price, for whatever reason, maple is about 55% the board foot cost of oak. So we'll make a turn onto Maple St.
It's much easier and cheaper to make the beams out of two 8/4 slabs glued together.
The first thing to do is to run them through our nice big jointer, to get one perfectly straight edge, then ripped on the big table saw for width.
Finally cross-cut for length, and we have two identical pieces.
Meanwhile, the only other person around was Tim. He continues working on the complicated windows for the 1268. And here you can see the various ways in which the windows can be open.
Now let's go check the 431 for the location of the actual scraper. All of the beams we have on hand have a section cut out on the inside top of the beam to clear the leaf springs, as seen here.
It might appear that wouldn't be necessary on the 450's, since there's no leaf spring protruding.
But after looking at the available photographs in service, we think the beams all had the notch.
I then made some rabbets in the two halves, to provide a slot for the shaft that holds the actual sleet scraper.
And the two halves are glued together. Come back next week!
Meanwhile, Tim has made significant progress on the windows.
Later, I also saw Gregg and John who were working on their projects. Another nice day at IRM!
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