the past 2 days

hey so in the last 2 days loads has happened
we haeve made a ridiculous amount of progress
everything is coming together and the bottom end bogie is pretty much ready to go back under the loco
so we have rebushed everything and have reassembled everything and had a few problems along the way as you do
so yesterday was mainly doing the bushes that were meant to have turned on monday but didnt till tuesday
so putting them in grinding round the edges then drilling them for grease holes and then using petes funky little air drill with an attatchment so you can grind a groove into the bush from the hole so that the grease will spread
we did around half of these before there was a problem with the earl so pete and bob dissappeared
so i went and helped gary out on 138's boiler
the cladding on that is all on so it was time to work on the smokebox
so the main steam pipes to the cyliners are in a pretty sorry state on the ends and with them being garret ones they don't have a joint but they do have a washer come spacer that is tapered to meet the taper on the either side
they are pulled tight with nuts and bolts
dinas had just gas axed through these bolts and so along with the rust were in a sorry sorry state
so spent a good hour or so just taking the bolts out of the pipes
then i got some new nuts to put the pipes in losely
the threads on the bolts were a little shagged though so i ran a die up them to just clean them up a bit
that pretty much finished the day
today has been pretty good
me and pete absoultely raged through the jobs today
was a really good day
we dry assembled everything but we were having a little trouble with the bushing on the valve gear hanger
then pin it was sitting on wasnt particularly round and had several burs on it so much emry cloth later it fitted
with a hammer and a wee bit of grease
so then came the job of refiting everything back in me being in the pit and pete above
and god those pits are filthy
it was going well untill we realised that we hadnt lifted the top ecentric strap on the firemans side so we had to undo everything and lift it out and refit
did that then put the drivers side in
then was a case of use the crane to lift the lot and slide in the new main pin which the rest of the valve gear sits on
this went in very easily so we left it in put the tapered pin in through the middle to stop it moving about and then drill the holes at the ends for the split pins
and that was that
one bogie rebushed and back together except for a couple of bits so tomorow its time to put it back under the ME
so yeh a good couple of days
t
the main