Of trailer and other

6th December 2020

A brief edition, hopefully still worth your time.

It has, as expected, been a productive few days but not that much of it photogenic. For starters, Andrew and I put a couple of evenings in manufacturing the 'deck tips' - mostly welding and grinding, though I have spent an hour or three driving the motorised hacksaw - with the result that by the time Adam arrived from HFS to collect the trailer on Wednesday the tips were in place on it but some small jobs remained outstanding. Getting the trailer back out of the yard is now reasonably slick - we don't like to block the traffic for long - and afterwards I showed Adam around and pointed out some of what he has helped move in and will in due course be taking out again. But although I had managed to get the control valves re-mounted on the back of the trailer, extended hoses with quick release couplings mounted on the neck, and the other end of the valves mounted on the valve block, actually plugging it all together and making it work was not practical and I planned to go down to the HFS yard on Friday to try it out.

Thursday I had to go to a customer to try and trace a couple of electrical faults: one was a no-brainer now that I had full electrical diagrams, but the other, which may be electrical or may be a program issue within the loco's PLC, continues to elude both me and the customer's engineers who supposedly 'know' the loco.

Anyway, after being late back on Thursday I was slow up on Friday and Adam asked to take a rain-check on my visit as they had a lot of work on, but offered that I could come down Saturday morning when their fitter would be able to assist. So leaving Andrew in bed I set off Saturday morning and teamed up with 'Nick' to get the swan-neck off the trailer and around to the back, and there plug the hoses in and get the winch to move briefly in and out and 'prove' the hydraulics. That done he got their welder out and under my direction, added a couple of bits of steel to the deck tips to hold them to the adjacent rails and stops to prevent the rails from moving up the trailer back.

By the time I got back to Darley Dale the shed was extensively re-arranged and the big shunt progressed to move things into better places. By the time we finished, the upper part of the shed was thick with exhaust fumes from the forklift. Today it was back to normal: Andrew manufacturing various bits in connection with the trailer and me on Claire, continuing with bits of wiring and pneumatics. Claire is now in the position of the shed that normally signifies a loco almost ready to go, and there certainly isn't a great deal left to do, but that sudden shock that it is only 3 weeks to Christmas rather hit me on Friday..

We're still exchanging e-mails with the manufacturers of the 'old' winch who are still insisting that because they've 'sold loads of these without complaint' that it must be us and not their winch that's at fault. They have got as far as offering a 50% refund but we're pushing for more. It is for the moment on the workshop floor awaiting time to recover our rope. In contrast the suppliers of the plasma cutter sent a replacement torch foc without argument which got the machine working, but within 5 minutes started demonstrating the same issues as before and after a while Andrew gave up and went back to gas as it was struggling to get through 15mm thick steel on a power setting that should have been good for 20. This will have to have our attention soon.

Forgive the short-ish edition tonight: I have an early start tomorrow and things to do first. Hopefully more to talk about and do next week. See ya then.