Of gronk and Gizmo

21st February 2021

Once again a bit of transport and a bit of work.

As said it was another silly o'clock start on Monday morning and by twenty past eight I was outside a certain railway workshops not far from Milton Keynes. Adam and Ian were just ahead of me and within a few minutes and a slight disagreement with a shunter who insisted that they didn't unload locos where we had last time, (and was where we had been told to then) the trailer was lined up and getting ready to unload. I had an additional task that morning as I had brought down some spanners with which to ease the lifeguards, which are a persistent nuisance. We had an issue dragging this loco on: the rear lifeguards (which on an 08 are held on by 3 bolts) had been slacked off and swung out of the way, but the fronts are a particular pest as they are held on with 4 fixings, two of which are studs, so can't be swung clear. In fact they hadn't been slacked at all, and although the right hand side one had been cut off a couple of inches, the left was still as the 'designer' intended, and bore the marks from where it had scraped paint off our ramp rails.

So before the loco moved I climbed under and backed off the nuts so as to give us a better chance of it reaching the bottom safely and serenely. With the ramp assembled and the transit chains detached, we powered up the Lister and I moved the hydraulic valve to winch 'out'. The rope merely drooped so I stopped, and as I watched, over 4 or 5 seconds, the rope gradually went taught again. Now, I know gronks are plain bearing locos and I know that as the loco stands, the oil film between bearing shell and axle journal dissipates so the effort required to start it moving goes up. But this loco is sat on a slope so gravity is acting in support of our efforts: it is 'gradient assistance' in the jargon. Yet here it was, moving so slowly that you couldn't see the loco budge, just the wire rope rise back up.

I paid out the winch rope again and the same thing happened. This wasn't mere entertainment for me: had I paid a lot of rope out and then the loco started to roll, as it got into its stride the shock as the rope went taught would have been considerable and inadvisable. After the third 'cycle' though, enough oil molecules had reached the parts others had vacated that the loco stayed tight on the rope and the unloading at last looked like it was progressing. (We had one gronk just before Christmas that didn't want to budge at all and in the end we had to back off the slack adjusters to get it to leave.) Once the gronk had reached terra firma (as opposed to rampus rickitius) a crew was summoned, I quickly did up the lifeguard nuts and the loco was driven away.

We packed up and by twenty-to-ten we were off site. No more loco moves had been planned for the week as Adam had a major job booked out of Southampton involving Police escorts and such, but that relied on a ship arriving on time and much to everyone's chagrin the boat was late so the job got delayed. Ah well.

Regular readers will know that I do my best to minimise my fossil fuel utilisation by which I mean that I drive with one eye on the fuel consumption display. On a good journey I expect to achieve or exceed 50mpg, despite the ole'van having now passed 70,000 miles. So maybe someone experienced in these matters might explain though why this is virtually impossible as the air temperature falls. This is counter-intuitive, since denser air means more oxygen in every cylinder-full and therefore more fuel should be able to burn completely, why else are 'charge air coolers' fitted to diesels? Yet a week last Saturday, when I set off with minus 4 indicated and it barely rose above freezing all day, the van turned in scarcely 42mpg yet on Monday, with the temp ranging from +4 up to +7, it was back to 50.4. Yes, two specific examples are not proof and may be due to other factors, but I'm seeing this repeatedly and the results are consistent. It has been suggested that possibly this is not the van performing differently but the instrumentation being 'temperature sensitive' - if so why bother displaying to tenths of an m.p.g??

Anyway, in between everything else I have been back in the workshops, preparing Claire amongst other things. One of the 'other things' is what I'm calling a Gizmo, though it's still in the prototype stage so if you read nothing more about it you may assume it has been a failure. For now, at least, I am hoping to improve rail handling on and off the low loader. We started off with rail tongs, and although designed for rail handling, they require two people to operate them and trying to keep in step while negotiating various wooden blocks, etc during ramp assembly proved more of a hindrance than a benefit so fell out of favour. I made up 2 rollers, but you've still got to hump the rails to them and once they get going, they can go in directions you don't quite expect. I've seen other hauliers use long bits of bar with a handle at one end and a hook at the other - through a fishplate hole and drag - keeps your fingers clear but you've still got to lift and drag and I'm getting a bit old for that. The Gizmo, if it works as I hope it should, will enable me to pick a rail up at one end so there's less ground drag and a wheel of sorts to assist motion both on and off the trailer. Will it live up to expectations? Might find out this week, meantime here's Andrew welding the handle on to it. (What, you thought I'd give my patent-able design away so soon?)

While the welder was deployed, he also got on with the front cross-stretcher for the 0-6-0 Fowler which will form the front engine mount - in this picture he welds on the two tabs that will carry the a/v mounts.

Later on he set about priming some of the other brackets from a few weeks ago, as we're hoping to squeeze in some time to get the RR engine into the loco at the same time as we extract the change-speed box which is going to be a spare for another Fowler.

A jobs list has been drawn up for Ludwig Mond, which is due to go out on a couple of weeks holiday soon, and the snag list on Claire is steadily reducing. One Saturday 3 of the 4 windscreen wiper motors worked for the first time in well over a decade - we know because the rear two were disconnected when Andrew first bought the loco and so the supply to all 4 had been isolated - and nothing had changed when he bought it back. In fact, I now think it was in the middle of having two new flex hoses fitted to the rears (which are on the doors) and the job stopped as they were 'too hard' to do, possibly back at Avenue Coking plant. Basically the hose had to screw into the bottom of a bulkhead fitting fixed to the cab back wall, but the air feed came into this from the top, so the incoming pipe had to be detached and the bulkhead loosened so that the flex could be screwed in. It was a faff but being an Enots thread not one I cared to try sourcing adaptors to work around. The one motor that doesn't work showed no life whatsoever when air was restored so probably its control valve is stuck shut: we'll find out.

Electrically my snag list is shrinking, but one elusive problem is that my clutch indicator is showing me clutch 'out' but goes off instead of showing clutch 'in'. I have a nasty feeling the problem is at the back of the associated relay and which was never expected to be 'accessible'. The 0-4-0 Fowler hasn't been forgotten. Using the 0-6-0 as a guide, I measured up how the running plate must have been and as a result issued a drawing to the profilers for 2 new pieces with the neccessary cut outs for the steps and sandboxes. Getting the cab access restored is well up my list, though the amount of commercial work I have on at the moment is daunting.

Well, it is amusing to see that this blog has had further mentions on both the IRS chat group and the WNXX forum, so the 'hit count' is well up this/last  week. Hullo to all new visitors, hope you will see fit to return. But that's about it for this week. Other than Tuesday my week is looking relatively clear but all that could change. So until next Sunday - the last day of February - same time, same website. See ya then.