5109

I think it's high time to post about the project that has been consuming the vast majority of my free time for the last several months: Toledo Lake Erie and Western locomotive 5109...
Over the course of the winter I have been involved in several nessasary repairs including replacing fan and drive belts, a severely belated oil change on the locomotive's air compressor, general maintenance and, most importantly, replacing the number 5 cylinder head and sleeve...
By now I have spent more time in the so-called "dog house" then I care to think about... But at this point I am not going to be satisfied until I watch this locomotive hitch up all three coaches and board the final coach for the trip to Waterville...

Unit 5109 is an S4, built by the American Locomotive Company (Alco) in 1953 for the Chessapeke and Ohio railroad (later known as the Chessie System). It is powered by a Seymour and McIntosh (Alco) 539 6-cylinder, turbocharged prime mover rated at 1,000 horsepower. It is a switcher-type locomotive, and thusly it's gearing and traction wiring are tailored for low-speed, high-torque operations.
This locomotive is over 50 years old, and is showing signs of it's age. Over the last three years the compression seal on cylinder 5 failed, resulting in a catastrophic compression leak. Uopn removing that cylinder's head it rapidly became obvious that both the head and the cylinder sleeve would need replaced; both showed a very obvious gap in excess of .020 inches (though this may not seem like much this is a compression seal that during the power stroke is subjected to tens of thousands of pounds per square inch pressure). Work ensued removing the damaged components from 5109 and scavanging replacement parts from one of TLEW's "dead" locomotives, engine 112.
This last weekend we seated the replacement cylinder sleeve, piston and cylinder head, and are striving to finish repairs and test the locomotive, and remove the "dog house" from the locomotive, hopefully before this weekend...
Here are some pictures of the parts involved, just to give an idea of the scale of the work involved...


The head of a single cylinder of the Alco 539 prime mover. Each cylinder displaces 1,595 cubic inches, for a total displacement of 9,572 cubic inches across all six cylinders. The two men in the background should give an idea of the size of this part.









The cylinder sleeve. This massive steel tube is pressed into the cylinder block, and is sealed by four O-rings. I had initially thought it would take two minutes to install the sleeve... In fact it took almost eight hours of excrutiating work. Installing the equally impressive piston (which I do not have pictures of) took a a mere two hours total...













The cylinder sleeve, installed into the cylinder block. The socket and extension at the edge of the picture are a 1-inch drive...

Chickens Pt. 2

Well after owning chickens for two weeks I have realized two things. 1: I in no way regret my decision to get them and 2: they are very messy birds! As of right now I am having to clean out my waterer at least twice if not three times daily because they keep fouling the water with depleted bedding... However the birds are progressing nicely, and have already doubled in size, with the exception of my rooster (pictured) who has almost tripled in size!
These are "Straight-run" chickens, meaning that there is no way of knowing what breed they are. However judging from their current plumage I have at least three if not four breeds. Most of the pullets (hens) are showing dark brown plumage, and are most likely Rhode Island Reds, or a descendant of that breed. The cockerel (rooster) has so far maintained his overall yellowish color and is most likely a white breed. And two of the pullets have noticeably different plumage than the other three, however it is still too early to be sure...
I will keep you posted on the birds' development, and will have pictures as soon as I move them to larger quarters (right now they are borderline overcrowded by the box I am keeping them in, making their care burdensome and any photography options poor at best). This week I hope to move them to larger quarters out in the old bar, I will take and post more pictures then.

Home Farming: Chickens

With my busy schedule I decided that I couldn't take the 2-3 days nessasary to prepare and plant a garden this year... So I decided to go for the other aspect of agriculture that I'm interested in, and to buy some chickens!
This is my flock of six as they looked a week ago. They've already grown, and are well on their way. I plan on erecting a henhouse on the concrete slab located on my property, however I have time to wait on that before these birds are big enough to require such housing.

Magnaflux Spotcheck

Magnaflux Spotcheck is a product that I learned about at work. It is a method of nondestructive testing of metallic objects for surface defects (such as cracks). Since I own overhead lifting equipment I felt the need to aquire the tools nessasary for OSHA-mandated safety checks (even though I am not governed by OSHA, since I don't have any employees). That and this test kit has many other uses...
In essence Spotcheck is a 5-step process involving three chemicals: A solvent-based cleaner, a penetrant and a developer. The solvent cleaner is just that, a solvent. Before purchasing the materials I did my research and discovered that the Magnaflux brand cleaner/remover is nothing but petroleum napthata, which is far more inexpensively available as Zippo lighter fuel, hence the yellow bottle of Ronsonol at the top of the kit.
At the heart of the kit is the Magnaflux Penetrant Dye (the right aerosol can). In essence it is nothing more than a mixture of a blood red dye and the most powerful penetrating oil that money can buy. This mixture is sprayed on the test part, allowed to soak and then wiped off with a rag soaked in solvent to remove any penetrant left on the sufrace.
After this the developer is applied. Basically the developer is merely talcum powder suspended in a powerful solvent (yes just talcum powder, or even finely ground clay, works, just not as well). When sprayed on the cleaned test part it draws the penetrant out of any defects, and the red dye stains the talc. This readily shows any defects in the test part.
I purchased the supplies to assemble this kit for less than half of the cost of the ready-made kit (which includes a can of penetrant, a can of developer, two cans of cleaner/remover, a penetrant marker, a shop rag and a case). The only part that I wish I had was the penetrant pen, other than that the rest of the kit wasn't worth the extra money...

Below is a demonstration of Spotcheck on a known surface discontinuity; where a flat-head bolt meets a plate. The results of this test were not as expected, I will explain below.



Penetrant (the blood-red stain) applied to the test part. I allowed about five minutes for the penetrant to work before the next step.














Surface penetrant removed with a rag soaked with Berryman's B-12 Chemtool. Notice the penetrant left in the "socket" of the allen-head screw working it's way up to the head of the bolt...










Developer applied and allowed to sit for five minutes. The developer applied to bare metal is titanium white; the pinkish color is due to the penetrant contained in the surface rust being pulled back up to the surface. Ideally the bolt should have been surrounded by a red ring, my guess is the lack of a ring is most likely due to both misapplication of the developer and the excessive amount of PB Blaster that I had soaked the bolt with prior to this test (and more likely than not didn't fully remove prior to the test). The entire head of the bolt is highlighted only by the penetrant seen seeping up from the socket as seen in the previous photo.


I want to redo this demonstration at a later date on another known discontinuity, at which point I will revisit this post...

Home Farming

I believe that the content of this post more accurately reflects "Hobbies and Interests" than "Home Improvements," so I will post it here instead of on my Home and Bar Improvement blog.
Within the last few years I have been steadily developing an interest in agriculture; both in the growing of crops and animal husbandry. To this end I have decided to make an attempt at at least some level of homesteading (the practice of growing and/or raising that that one needs to survive).
First and foremost I plan on planting a garden to grow those vegetables that I love the most: Tomatoes, carrots, sweet corn and asparagus. The last of these requires special care and growing conditions, which I have the means to provide... In addition to my planned vegetable garden I plan to plant at least two asparagus rows; one planted with a "local" variety of asparagus from my family homestead of Grelton, and the other with a commercial "High Production" variety.
As for my garden I plan on planting a variety of vegetables I enjoy, including but not limited to carrots, lettuce, string beans and sweet corn. I also have a desire to grow dent corn, but that desire more reflects my desire to make my own beer than that of growing my own food...
In addition to the usual garden vegetables I also would like to grow dent corn (as I already mentioned), grapes (which I would like to aquire from clones of family grape vines) and my own hops (which can be purchased from home-brewing suppliers, however it is too late this year to aquire the hop roots). I have the land and growing conditions to accomidate all of this, and though I am in preference of natural farming practice I am certainly not opposed to the use of commercially-available chemical fertilizers (from my decidedly limited experiance I like TSC-branded 12-12-12 fertilizer).
As far as pesticides go I tend to prefer the deterrance route (electric fencing), however I am an advocate of an old, effective and totally human-safe insecticide. It is made at home by boiling one full-size pouch of chewing tobacco in one quart of water. After boiling the tobacco is strained out and discarded, and the resulting "tea" is sprayed on the desired plants. Cigarette tobacco (which is considerably cheaper) can also be used, however suger will need to be added to make the mixture "sticky." Since the tobacco is prepared for human consumpion it is completely safe to eat, even without washing. However the nicotine contained therein is lethal to most insects. It is notable that this mixture is water-soluable, and will need to be reapplied after watering or rainfall.
As I said I am also interested in keeping livestock. I had originally planned to have more land than I do, and to live in the country. As such I had wanted to keep 5-10 head of cattle, and pasture then over a "rotated range" of 3-10 acres in three "zones." By moving the cattle between these zones it ia supposedly possible to raise saleable cattle without the use of commercial animal feed or feed corn. However with my property it is doubtful that I would be able to grass-feed more than one or two steers, and I don't have either the housing for those steers nor the money to build one.
As such I am considering raising chickens, which are considerably smaller (and thusly easier to feed). I belive that by fencing off a fifth of my property and fabricating a henhouse I could easily house at least a dozen hens.
I have read that by raising a kitten alongside the baby chicks is the best way to deter rodents (as the resulting adult cat will be accustomed to the chickens, and vice versa, yet the cat will remain agressive to any intruding vermin), and if I decide to erect a henhouse this is what I plan on doing, in additon to the double protection of both chicken wire and low-level electric fencing.
Thouch I would like to keep cattle I doubt that it would be possible given the limited amount of land that I own. However a gerden and mini-farm are dreams that I have not given up on...

The Village (of Texas) Blacksmith

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on this subject, so I think it's high time that I did so. Though I have not done nearly as much smithing this winter as I would've liked to I have gotten some accomplished. Here is what I have accomplished so far:
This is the "Hot Set" that I mentioned in a previous post. It is made of S7 tool steel; properly austentized and quenched, and tempered at 500 degrees. Though it looks rough and doesn't follow the traditional profile of a hot-set (which greatly resembles a hatchet) I believe in function over form, and this tool accomplishes it's intended function; that of severing heated metals. Of course it still needs a handle (as it is the recoil of the hammer blows is almost hard enough to break fingers!!!).



This is the beginnings of a large kitchen knife which, owing to my late delivery I may as well say was intended as a gift for my mother. This is a fragment of an old file (1095 tool steel) which I was in the process of seperating the blade and tang when I lost my ambition (both due to burnout and serous flaws in my forge). When I get around to finishing it I see the blade as being 6-8 inches long, and I plan on handling it with either stag (my preferred choice) or hickory wood.



A dual-purpose scraper I made for the TLEW railroad out of rebar (probaly the lowest-grade steel of them all, but adequate for the intended use). The flat end is sharpened at a 45 degree bevel, the flat end is square. Both ends are hardened (a relative term considering the extreme low hardenability of rebar), and the shank is left both unfinished and untreated.

The tools I used to make these: My (considerably undersized) anvil and a pair of cross-peen hammers. The right hammer is a 3 lb. cheap Chinese "Harbor Freight" hammer (whose brother, by the way, I recently managed to break at work!). The right is a 4 lb. Mexican hammer (a considerable improvement over the other) which cost more than both of the previously mentioned hammers combined! I also have a small ball peen hammer (a gift from my father), and I plan on adding a 2 lb. cross peen hammer to this collection. I would LIKE to add a 4 lb. straight peen hammer (identical to the pictured hammers, except the "pointed" end is parallel to the handle), however I think it unlikely that I will find one...

The Server Rack: Private Branch eXchange (PBX)

My latest pet project is once again in the one field of Information Technology that I actually enjoy working with: Server computers.
My latest server is an application system built around the Asterisk Telephony Engine and the GNU/Linux Operating System. The whole project got started by happensance: Whilst searching through images for VMware I found out about Asterisk, an Open Source program for managing telephone connectivity. Despite my minimal use of telephones the subject of Telephony holds a great fascination to me. Owing to my somewhat obsessive nature I got more than a little interested in this software, as it gave me the oppertunity to play with a device that I have always found facinating: the PBX.
Building the physical system turned out to be easy: A trip to EK Computer to find an empty case yielded a nearly complete computer. The case, which I purchased for the price of $15, contained a CD-R drive, a floppy drive, a 450-watt power supply and, very surprisingly, a 2-way SMP Pentium-III motherboard with a pair of 500MHz processors! All that was needed was some memory (which, after some scrounging and a surprise find at Goodwill, turned out to be 512 megabytes) and a hard disk.
Installing the software was the easy part: Digitum (the creators and sponsors of Asterisk) released a specialized Linux distrubution named "AsteriskNOW" specifically tuned for the PBX software... After adding a ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) card and customizing the configurations I now have a working PBX... However as of the moment it lacks any sort of interface to the outside world, severely limiting it's usefulness...
I plan on connecting the PBX to Skype, through which I can have a real telephone number and basically unlimited calling for about $60... A year! However currently the only way to make this connection relies on unsupported software, which I have yet to get working. Oh well, it's been done before, and I have no doubt that I can get it done eventually.

Note: The cases on the rack are (from left to right) Windows 2000 fileserver, Asterisk PBX, a SCSI drive enclosure (currently just being stored) and a power conditioner for the PBX. The left monitor is connected to the server, the right to the PBX.