Staurday 6th August

Attendance 2:

Adam got down early today so while waiting for Jason to arrive Adam quickly sanded down a CoBo door that had previously been painted but bits were blown onto the finish. As Adam applied a coat of Hemp Jason arrived. So the first cuppa of the day was had…..

And onto the main work for the day. The Generator of the 15 needed to be painted into the same wood pigeon colour as the engine block so Adam and Jason armed themselves with some sandpaper and headed round to where the 15 is now located in the Steam shed. Basically the plan was to give the Generator a light sanding so providing the new coats of paint a key to stick to. This was a fairly time consumer process. The main generator was fairly straight forward but the auxiliary genny and Exciter had lots of awkward areas to sand.  Also the covers were taken off the auxiliary genny and Exciter to aid the sanding process. With the sanding process finished Adam and Jason give the generators a wipe down with clothes and white spirit. At this stage it was decided to have a cuppa…

After the cuppa Jason retrieved the undercoat and a selection of brushes and the pair of them made their way back to the 15 and started to apply a coat of undercoat to the generators and the covers that had been removed.  At just before midday Adam left Jason to finish off the undercoating as a visitor by the name of Patrick who is a member of the C15PS had arranged to come down to the site and Adam was going to show him around the loco’s under the C15PS care. The tour lased about 2 hours and at the end of it after Adam had bid Patrick and his family farewell he and Jason broke for lunch……

Following lunch Jason disappeared off to do a couple of jobs on the Class 14, these would take him the rest of the afternoon. Adam meanwhile had noted that the panniers that cover the exhausters on the 15 hadn’t been painted since they were painted in green anti-rust paint. So before Jason had disappeared they retrieved one of the panniers from the CoBo tent and placed into the CoBo container where the other one was located. The first one was painted in undercoat however the one that had been in the tent had small patched of rust starting to appear. To combat this Adam ran some sandpaper over the rust patches and once removed a coat of undercoat was applied to the second pannier. These will be given a coat of top coat in the near future.

So with the panniers completed Adam turned his attention back to the Genny area. The undercoat had dried nicely so Adam decided to apply a coat of wood pigeon. So after digging out the pot of paint a couple of paint brushes Adam made a start on painting the main generator. Adam completed one side of the Main Generator and the Auxiliary Generator and with time getting on had to call it a day. This brought to an end a very productive day……..

Sunday 7th August

Attendance 1:

Jason was on his own today but he had the genny repaint to finish off plus a couple of Class 14 tasks that he had remembered needed doing, so he wrote down the jobs on the dry wipe board on the kitchen area and set to work, first off he went into Paddy and did one of the Class 14 tasks that he had wrote on the board, this was soon accomplished so he could move into the works and continue with the genny repaint, Adam had mostly painted the R/H side of the genny set so Jason started off there and finished off the side as well as doing the ends of the Auxiliary Generator and the Exciter, after that was done he moved around to the opposite side and completed the painting of the genny, some of the brush gear covers had been removed from Aux gen and Exciter these had been painted separately the day before and were laid out on the sole bar either side of the loco, as the paint on the genny was still wet these would have to be re-fitted another day so Jason moved them to a more secure location and went back to the support coach to have some lunch before starting another job.

After lunch Jason went back into Paddy and did a little more Class 14 work after which he returned to the support coach and pulled out the flywheel guards that attach to the end of the generator field coil drum and cover the engine flywheel to protect things from getting caught in the flywheel while its spinning, these guards were in a fairly gungy state, so Jason had to resort to using a de-greasing solution on them first, this entailed taking the guards to the bench outside, brushing on the de-greaser with a scrubbing brush until the oil & grease was starting to loosen, then taking them behind the coach where the de-greaser was washed off with water using a hose pipe, this de-greaser worked miracles and easily removed the majority of the oily residue, after all the guards had be de-gunged Jason got out the drelling gear and drelled up all the guards from then he took them back inside the coach where he applied a coat of the green anti-corrosive primer to each one before hanging then up in the paint cabin to dry, this wound up the weekends proceedings.

The next working weekend is September 3/4. If you wish to lend a hand please contact Chris Tatton