|
I've finished the restoration for this engine. After giving it some thought, I decided to go for a full restoration, except for the baseplate, since I didn't I want to lose the original decal.
I started by repairing the boiler, originally it should have had a stand to keep it stable, but that was gone, so I soldered one onto it. There was no paint left on it, so I repainted it and replaced the wick with "wonder wick".
There was quite a lot to do with the engine itself, the whistle tread needed re-soldering, and while taking it apart, I realized the steam dome had to be re-soldered too, since it came right off.
I suspect one of the previous owners did some soldering work on the boiler too, since there was a load of solder coming out of the end cap when I heated it. The boiler already had a dent, but unfortunately I created another one by attaching it a bit too secure in the vice. I've been able to remove the dents a little bit, but you can still see them when you take a close look.
Above you see the boiler with the end cap removed. Because the two treads I had to re-solder where on the opposite sided of the boiler, I first re-soldered one of them, and after that continued by removing the other end cap.
In the process I also made the mistake of soldering on the steam dome in the wrong way, so I had to redo that one, here you see the mistake:
After resolving that mistake, I finaly could put the boiler back together, so I could test it under pressure, this is what it looked like assembled:
The assemblage was a bit of a pain, because the piston wouldn't fit into the cylinder, no matter what I tried. There wasn't anything obvious blocking it, no lime scale or old oil residue. Eventually I decided to sand the cylinder down until it would fit, and that worked. The test run wend very well, you can see a movie of it on the left side of the page.
After the test run, I continued by painting all the small parts
And cleaning up the soldering work and a lot of polishing.
After all that, the end result looks like this:
|
