Shed Turn - Trimmings for the Y14

Today, I spent the day making trimmings for stock and fitting axlebox trimmings to the Y14. In case you had forgotten, trimmings are used to assist and control the flow of oil into the many bearings in the motion of the engine, around the valve gear, piston and valve crossheads & guides. Here's the box of trimmings we had at the beginning of the day:

The Y14 has two tail trimmings in each axle box, which fit into two holes and wick oil from four reservoirs. The axle box looks like this from the top:

This one is on the driver's side centre driving wheel and is relatively easy to get to. The rear driving wheel axle boxes are hidden on the inside by the ash pan and the brake gear, and the front ones are hidden by the crosshead guides and crossheads - its best to access these through the spokes, from the outside.

From the top, the reservoirs look like this - there are two 2 1/2" holes to the bearing, and a 1" blind hole; you need two tail type trimmings with 10" feeders for each box:

Here's some I made. The very dark, oily ones are the only three that were fitted to the twelve axlebox trimming locations on the loco - most of them were missing or with useless, 1" feeders which would not reach the reservoirs.

You have to soak them in oil before fitting:

Getting the trimmings in was fiddly but not too difficult with a pair of long surgical forceps:

Once I had the wire in the hole, I could manoeuvre the woollen feeders into their reservoirs.

This was a bit more difficult working through the spokes:

Of course the problem with doing them from the outside is that the motion or the connecting rods prevent you getting access to all the wheels at the same time. I thought that it was 'game over' until we could get a shunter to the loco (and the 4MT was behind the Y14) but Fitter Bob and Driver Dave introduced me to the wonders of the Pinch Bar, a handy tool that allows you to move the whole loco on your own:

Basically it's a heavy wooden lever with a foot that pushes on the ground and a moveable pad that lifts the wheel, so you can move the wheel a few degrees at a time. It took us 5 minutes to move the loco 1/4 of a turn, which allowed me access to the last axlebox.

With the Y14 done, I turned my attention to making up various other trimmings to fill up the box. Starting with some 1.0 mm² twin & earth, I made up some 6" lengths of wire:

I bent these into a U shape:

Next you make a loop in the end around a bit of bar:

No picture, but with the pure new wool (100% wool) that you bought from the craft shop that very morning (they don't seem to mind some bloke turning up in filthy overalls) make a batch of strands of your desired length by wrapping them around a suitable bit of wood, card, or your fingers.

I later learned that you should use worsted, as the fibres are very long. I few months later I discovered a couple of the wool trimmings I'd made prematurely broken... 

 Lay the number you need into the twisted wire:

I was making a 'Plug & Tail" type here

By close of play, I had filled the box up more or less. I could have got on a lot quicker had I remembered that the Black Book has a neat table of instructions:

No matter.

Cracking sunset on the way home: