The Restoration Continues
Well, I am finally getting around to updating this in October of 2002. It has been almost a year since we hauled the engine home, and work has sort of ground to a halt for a bit. The engine is sitting on its foundation and is partially lined up and grouted. A lot of the polishing is done and the frame has a coat of paint on it. This winter will be spent in the shop, doing things like polishing the valve bonnets, making some new nuts and bolts, and machining the casting to replace the missing main bearing oiler. Unfortunately, a lot of work was done without the camera handy, and some of the pictures that were taken are of such poor quality that they won't work here. I definitely learned a lesson about trying to take photos inside with one of those cheap disposable cameras. We will make up for it when we resume in the spring, I have a new digital camera that does a nice job inside.
Here is a scan of the original brass tag.
This is the engine frame and cylinder after we got it into the engine shed. The majority of the frame has been sandblasted, but the cylinder was left alone, the ends of the cylinder were polished, not painted. In fact, any portion of the engine that was machined was polished instead of painted. It seems that the folks who ran this engine were not afraid of oil, and all that oil did a pretty good job of preserving a lot of the polished parts. There was some nasty pitting on the outside of the cylinder casting, but we polished it up pretty good. More pictures of the bright work in the spring.
Once we got the engine inside, I convinced Paul that we should remove the crosshead tunnel and the cylinder so we could thoroughly clean and paint all of it, even the parts that no one was going to see again. It seemed to make sense to paint a lot of the parts prior to reassembling it. Paul is seen here painting the interior of the crosshead tunnel.
Getting the flywheel into the building was not going to be easy. One late summer afternoon when none of the "experts" were around, we used Paul's crane truck to carry the flywheel around to the front of the building.
That's Bill driving the truck and Paul in the cab of the crane, keeping an eye on things. Keeping the boom as close to straight up as possible and keeping the flywheel as close as possible to the truck allowed us to gently carry the flywheel, which is 8300 pounds, plus another ton or so for the shaft, eccentric and crank arm. This was the biggest one piece flywheel that Allis made on this type of engine and it is good, if it were any bigger it would have been a lot more difficult to handle.
Here we are backing up to the engine shed door. We are not quite certain yet how we are going to get it into the building, but we are determined to do it.
At this point we had to figure out how to get the flywheel into the building. We set it down and ran the crane boom down to the horizontal position. We put a chain over the boom as close to the truck as we could get and then hooked the chain to the flywheel and raised the boom just enough to get the flywheel off the ground. once the flywheel cleared the ground, Bill slowly backed the truck in through the door and Paul swung the crane boom first to one side and then to the other so that we could swing the flywheel and crankshaft in through the door. It was nip and tuck, but we got it into the building.
