Shed turn - Stripping the WD

 Well here we are, the start of the winter off-season proper. New Year is over, Christmas is but a distant memory of indigestion, headache and loosening the belt, and we are done with footplate turns. With a week off to recover, it’s time to go and throw some spanners around Weybourne shed.

The Weybourne ‘Trackworks’ Lockdown is less than a week away and all the locos are inside, bar the B12 and Ring Haw’s chassis which are awaiting transport offsite for overhaul. Their boilers are still in the yard alongside ‘Sidmouth’ whose new firebox is ready for fitting.

The Y14 is having her suspension rubbers replaced, the 4MT is part way through washout, the 9F is waiting in the queue and the WD is sitting here. Foreman Alan (aka Fitter Alan and sometimes Fireman Alan) suggested I might like to start taking it to bits.

Something like 50 years ago, well maybe not that much but it’s a nice round number, I sat in my bedroom taking a fishing reel to bits - a multiplier, with line spooling and braking mechanisms - quite complicated as fishing reels go. Much swearing and gnashing of teeth were a feature of life at home for the next few days as I tried to get it back together, succeeding eventually and buoyed up by my success I carried on taking stuff to bits; even after dozens of vehicle projects & a 30 year career in engineering I haven’t stopped yet…

Today it’s the WD’s turn for some attention. Aside from a washout it is having a valve and piston exam this winter, so getting access for that is the first job. This is where we start, the fireman’s side cylinder:

Or maybe here, the driver’s side cylinder! Valves and pistons come out forwards so we will start by removing the covers:

There we go, a few bolts and the sheet metal covers are removed revealing the cylinder and valve covers - these are the pressure retaining covers, not the cosmetic sheet metal covers we just removed! At the top, we can see the valve spindle cover and below, at the bottom of the cylinder cover we can see the cylinder relief valve, provided to prevent damage from excess pressure in the cylinder caused by water ingress from carry-over or priming.

First though we are going to look at the other end and remove the piston glands. We start by taking off the copper oil pipes and the felt oilers around the piston rods: I spent an afternoon replacing these felts a couple of years ago and I was surprised to find the felts were completely missing on one side and very hard, black and shrunken on the other. Apparently once the gland starts passing they are soon blown out.

On to the glands; these come out when we have removed those six nuts. The driver’s side popped out with the force of the spring - the second one needed a special hook making to hoik it out:

Here’s the gland pack: two pairs of machined bronze ‘U’s held together with a spring. They are flat and bear on the back of the retaining ring which seals to the cylinder block casting.

This is the view from the rear:

Getting ready to pull the heavy covers off, I removed the front relief valves:

The cover nuts came off very easily with a battery impact wrench. These are 1” BSW:

The last three on each side had to be removed with the wrench, as the pony truck wheels would not let the rattle gun get access:

After tea, we all trooped off to the conference room for a meeting where we learnt that over the next few weeks, this scene will become a hive of activity as the crossover is replaced, which will include the entrance trackwork to the yard. The work is being carried out by Trackwork, and they will take over the whole Weybourne site with the exception of the station, platforms and the shed itself. We will have to use the station car park and enter the shed using the steps by the Sidmouth boiler.

I'll take another picture next week and we'll see what has changed.

Meanwhile onto my next job - unboxing the WD ready for washout. This is a washout plug:

These are used to provide access to the interior of the boiler for inspection and washing out. This is what they look like when you take them out - there are various sizes, all with similar square heads but with various size taper threads:

They are all numbered individually, and are located according to the washout map:

There are nineteen on the backhead alone. This is #7 on the map:

There are 21 on the boiler barrel and firebox wrapper, some of which are quite hard to reach and all of which can only be accessed from the running boards:

There are also four in the smokebox. These are in the smokebox tubeplate under the superheated tubes and behind the blast pipe - it helps if you are quite small when you get to these:

In truth a couple of the plugs in the boiler firebox wrapper are accessed from the ground. They are in the lowest part of the boiler above the foundation ring, near the throatplate - one of these had been used to drain the boiler before I arrived; the other drained a bit more sludge over my feet:

By the time I had cleaned that lot up it was 4 o’clock, time for a tidy up and to count the plugs into a tray ready for cleaning. With all that put away I turned to the last job on Alan’s list, stripping the water gauges.

First job is to remove the guards, then the gland nuts and the top plug. There’s a loose plug in there which seals the gauge against boiler pressure if the glass breaks on the road. With that out, you can try and push the glass up and out. This worked (with a bit of scraping) on the fireman’s side, but the driver’s side wasn’t having any of it and having sought advice from Fitter Alan, we attempted to twist it with a pair of pliers and of course it broke in the process. 

Once that was out, I could clean up the broken glass and box up everything for cleaning. I rodded out the steam and water ports with a bit of round bar.

By the end of the day, I was a bit filthy - like I haven’t been for ages since I do mostly firing turns these days and don’t often clean out fireboxes from the inside!

Same time next week?