2 updates in 2 days but lots has been happenning.

Here you can see the wheels and our newly forged axles at Multitech in Featherstone

The wheels are obvious, the axles are the two forgings behind the upright cylinfer. Apparently very well forged.  

The springs were also ordered today from Don Springs in Sheffield.  It is great to find so much engineering resource still around.

A rainy drizzly damp day with no spectaculr news but progress was made.  Jim and I spent the day putting finishing touches to the ceiling boards, driving home some screws that got missed last week then straightening out the fill in pices that go along the front oedge of the monitor ribs, then screwing them down from above.  Originally they were a push fit but we don't qiute trust 113 year old wood when the tram starts rattling along track.  They can be seen in this picture.

The ceiling is looking great, all we need now is the moitor windows to complete that part.

away from the tram the axles have finally been delivered and macjining and assembly of the wheelsets can go ahead.  My ancient brain is having to cope with me raking up buts of my first year university engineering from 40 years ago as the design of the suspension is ongoing. (I don't finish my degree and pursued other career paths).  The springs are designed and ready to order and a rubber engineering company are working on the bushes/cones that act as dampers.  All exciting stuff.

Next week we plan to prepare for the canvassing of the ceiling by mixing lots of grey gloop. 

Well I was Billy no mates today as all the others were otherwise engaged, extending their garages (His fault for buying a wide car), bidding for postcards, working or in hospital, the latter can be excused but he will still have some drawings to check at visiting time tomorrow.

I got on with the ceiling boards and by the end of the day had managed to get all 19 screwed down with a total of 532 1" No 6 Stainless steel screws.  These end about 10" from the upper cantrails so there are packing pieces on top of the roof sticks between the last boards and the cantrails.  These are made out of off cuts from the ceiling planks and I got them fitted on A side.  I then looked at Jim's drawing from 2006 of the roof structure and discovered that they will do a marvellous job of holding down the edge of the canvas, so they will have to come off next week.

Eddie from Multitech called to pick up the wheels for machining at Featherstone in the same factory that did Tornado's connecting and coupling rods as well as some other bits and pieces.  The axles are due for delivery any day now after Ultrasonic testing so hopefully we should have a pair of wheelsets by the end of November.

Away from the tram Bernard looked at my first drawing of the axlebox assembly last Thursday and made various helpful suggestions.  Jim and I then went to Crich and spent most of Friday measuring up Chesterfield 8, me on the floor taking an axlebox apart and Jim inside taking the seats apart.  Some older visitors were quite surprised when we spoke and jumped saying "They're real!".  "I thought they were dummies." to which the reply was "We are".  Saturday and Sunday was then spent putting all the extra measurements into the CAD drawing.  By Saturday evening it looked about right except that I couldn't fit some small pieces in to retain the bearing and the oiler.  Sunday morning I re checked Bernard's notes and then widened the box and everything fell into place.  The result is below.

 I only started CAD earlier this year using Tutorial videos on You Tube as I needed to do some Model railway drawings for brass etchings.  This has now proved very useful as I am having to take over the engineering design from Bernard due to his health problems.  It all seems to fit and has been compiled from a variety of sources including Kinnear Clark, photographs of a Birkenhead car and measuring Chesterfield 8 at Crich. Hopefully we are about there and I can then commission the pattern for the axlebox trunnion. a pdf of the above drawing is available to ayone who is interested.

A bit of a strange day that seemed to be 1 step forwards and 2 backwards.   Jim had taken a series of filler pieces home to clean up ready for refitting.  These go onto the ceiling in between the monitor ribs and had not been screwed into place, just a tight fit between the ribs.  He noticed that the ends were slightly tapered suggesting that they needed to be fitted from above before the ceiuling booards were in place.  So we started fitting them on C side where the boards were not on yet and Paul found a way opf forcing the ribs slightly apart so that they sprang back and held the spacerss tightly.  We then had to unscrew 5 boards on A side to do the same procedure.  However All the spacers eventually got fitted and we then realised that 4 rather strangely shaped little pieces completed the run between the last rib and the bulkhead.  We got two of these in place but need to finally straighten everything up.  We even mananged to get two more boards on A side screwed down and some of the 140 screws replaced on C side.  Jim also trial fitted one of the screens on D end and it's looking good.   Not spectacular but steady progess.  This is what comes of not knowing the assembly sequence when the car was built.

Well it's now 5 years since we started and alot of work has been done.  Today was a funny sort of day as our engineering Guru, Bernard is very poorly and we were all a bit subdued.  However we felt that the best thing we could do was to crack on.  Paul continued putting ceiling boards on and got three more on C side placed.  In the morning i strated to sand down the only teo surviving upper deck floor boards.  Thsi provided an immense amount of information and one of them showed where the cross wise floor latts were as well as the latts near the landing.  This enabled us to fix the position of the seats to within half an inch as well as the number and position of the floor latts.  We are still working on how the seats were fastened down though there are some marks where the staff at Kikstall road obviously took some screws out and back filled the holes, however these were in the centre of the seats and not the ends as we would expect.

In the afternoon Paul and I worked at getting the wedges driven home on C side and cut off so that we can finish the ceiling next week.  Jim and Stephen continued rubbing down  and also spent some time sorting out the top garage ready for when the sheelsets arrive in a few weeks time.

All in all it wa a good day and the interior now looks like this:-

It's good seeing the 107 number in it's pristine glory plus the ceiling coming along.

At he end we tidied the car up to take some photos to send to Bernard and also put the D end canopy bend on the sort out some design issues.  It was amazing how this latered the appearance of the car.

OK it's only held on by clamps but it does look good.