Steam & Excursion > You want a dirty job?

If you wanted a dirty job you did not have to look far in a steam locomotive repair shop.  Even oil burners such as this T&P 2-10-4 going thru a major overhaul  in Ft Worth's Lancaster shop would get you very dirty.  Sanding of flus would provde a lot of dirty sand that failed to go out the stack when flus were sanded  I remember when 610 came back from the Souther fan trips it was loaded with dirty sand in the smokebox.  Many 5 gallon buckets of that stuff were shoveled out..

---

And, with coal burners, it was cinders.

Furnace cement was filled in along the  bottom of the smokebox against the front tubesheet and against smokebox door ring as a ramp to smooth out the flow of gasses, but cinders still collected.

-LD

Looks as if they are using a needle gun to clean the scale and dirt off a rivet or something.

Bob Krieger
Cheyenne, WY

Looks to an Ingersol-Rand #90 air hammer.

Looks to be the experienced guy is giving a newbie a lesson on how to hold the air hammer.

What’s missing in the picture is a younger lad, outside the boiler holding the dolly-bar —- bucking the head of the hit rivet.
The dolly bat is a massive, solid steel cylinder with a cupped end and a handle on the other.

When the red- hot rivet is tossed to the hammer crew, they insert the plain end of the rivet from the inside, and the dolly-bar guy
firmly holds the tool against the protruding end.   At the hammer end of the rivet, it has a ‘factory-formed head.
As the hammer drives the rivet, the dolly bar bounces away, even tho the holder tries mightily to hold the bar from bouncing...
but its the ‘bounce’ that forms the round head on the outer end.

The trick is to get the rivets uniformly tightened, but not over-tight.  If too tight, when things cool down, the tension is greater than the adjacent rivets...and over time, the rivet with too much tension will break...  That’s  not a good thing...

in today’s world there are inventions that more easily clamp with a uniform clamping pressure, are ‘driven’ at ambient temperatures, etc they vary from pecisision -torqued threaded fasteners to two piec rivers with a weakening grove, that bears when the proper tension is reached...

So far, I’m not aware that those schemes are approved for loco boiler fastenings.

The  major SEAMS  in today’s world are precision welded, then examined by X-ray and recorded..

But, this is how good riveters are made...learn by doing...
Practice on non-critical areas like smoke boxes, before graduating to pressure vessels..

That style of boiler arts is fading very quickly...and preserved at a few steam loco boiler shops, here and there..

​W.

not proofed yet...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/19 13:41 by wcamp1472.