penultimate week

ok so its been my penultimate week here
and ive had a great time
i havent been properly clean alll weekk grrrr
but the meerkats here (his car needed fixing to get thru the MOT so he drove here from holland for bob and dylan too he reallly is mad )
im watching the hockey at the same time though its canada 1 0 at the mo
so this week me and bob have been working on the ricket
but on monday pete and myself were putting the rivets into the lifting links and the links holders
the holes drilled through were with a half inch drill
then reamed with a half inch reamer
and so we were using half inch bar to go through
but when we tried to knock the first one in we may have kinda got it stuck
the words oh bother were used
so we drilled that one out
i then put all the others in the little myford super 7 lathe and just used some fine emery paper and toook a thou or so off
then we knocked them in allll hunky dorey
then from tuesday onwards its just been about blanche my favourite lady at the mo
so we hydrauliced the boiler and smokebox
we found 3 leaking superheaters
a leaking main steam pipe
a leaking main exhaust pipe
and a hole through from the top of the main steam pipe flange through to the outside of the cylinder
it was large enough to fit a hack saw blade through
i remade the joints between for all the fittings on tuesday afternoon
wednesday morning i put everything back in except for the super heaters as bob re ground the ball joints
i messed up one of the joints and we only realised this after everything was in and (its 2 0 canada)

canada 2 america 1

we also took the chimney liner out
as the peticoat at the bottem wasnt fitting properly so this was making the loco not draught properly
we spent about half a day rolling the liner circular again
this involved heating it up and bashing it down repeatedly on an elephants foot
then we welded the peticoat on and put the liner into the chimney and used a long old piece of pipe to ensure it was lined up correctly making sure the blast actually goes up the chimney
i also took the burner out and took it apart cleaned it up and put it back and also drained the axle boxes as we did a 30 day fitters inspection on it
then i took apart all the cylinder drain cocks and replaced the o rings in them
apres ca it was a case of putting a fire in the beast and seeing what leaked
nothing was the answer to that
but the cylinder drains did blow through so thats mondays job i think
any way time for a beer with the hockey
nighty night
x