Of a quiet start

2nd January 2022

Another Sunday, another year.

As I left it last week we had an acetylene crisis. Energas were closed until the 4th January, but Twiggs as local agents, were open Wednesday morning 'for collections only'. What did that mean? Pre-ordered stuff only? Selling but no deliveries? I rang them at half nine and the lady confirmed gas sales were OK so I headed down to the shed, and unaided, got the empty acetylene bottle out of the trolley, round to the van and in. Armed with an example of Andrew's Energas account statements (one with a Chinese take-away order scribbled on the back) I headed down to Matlock, and toddled up to their sales floor. It was not a Boxing Day Sales crush: there were two customers in front of me and four assistants standing around. One took Andrew's statement and went to the back office to check we were 'known' to them. He didn't offer to supply any fried rice. Ten minutes later we were over at the gases compound, sharing the struggle to handle these heavy cylinders and bemoaning that they never put handles on them. I took the new bottle back to the shed, reversed the process of transferring it from van to trolley, and then went back to the Country Pile for lunch.

In the afternoon we headed back down, the new acetylene bottle allowed the remaining casing pins to be extracted. I was looking closely at certain bits of Hudswell D1387 - a new alternator has been dug out as tbat fitted to the engine looks/feels distinctly unhealthy, but of course the bracketry won't fit so measuring was done ready to draw up new brackets. I forgot to mention that a week or so ago the 03 - normally referred to here as 03 901 but currently running at Midsomer in its original persona as D2128 - suffered a mechanical failure. The pictures they sent up showed that a taper lock bush had fractured, and having fractured, the pulley it was supposed to be locking to came free and therefore both charge pumps stopped. I contacted my regular supplier and while they had that bush in stock for shafts of 48 and 50mm diameters, the size I needed - 45mm - was not and they doubted being able to get one before Christmas or put it another way, Jan 4th. So I ordered one from there anyway and went hunting on ebay, and promptly found the exact bush available on a 'Buy it Now' in Lincolnshire. I ordered that too, figuring whichever came first I would send on to Midsomer and the second be put on the shelf on the principle that if you have one ready you won't need it. Well the ebay seller's arrived on Wednesday while I was at the shed, and on Thursday that was re-packaged and posted on to Midsomer: whether it has arrived yet I know not.

Back on Friday Andrew and I spent most of the day at the shed. A major shunt was undertaken: Ludwig Mond, a stiff old girl to get moving first thing, was returned to track 3B where it will not have to be disturbed often, and joined by 144V. 14901 was taken back over to track 1 as it is more free-running, and thus easier to pull and push when clearing track 1 to get vehicles round the back. The OBA was brought back over to the shed and the two German flats re-united on track 1. It was not without incident as Tom was playing up again. Andrew at one point opened the pump bleeds and primed it, finding air in the pump though quite how it comes to have got there is not clear. In between times we resumed extracting bits from the Dorman 6QT that was once in the EE D1197.

The torque converter came off after I had managed to drain most of the diesel from it (there is a drain plug on the bottom of a Twin Disc converter, but nine times out of ten the top of the plug shears rather than unscrew as no-one normally drains them. Whenever possible we replace the plug with a tap so that you can drain the oil properly). The Matlock end of the OBA was reunited with its steel sheet and a few bolts put in to retain it: it has several dents and has buckled slightly from the patches let in to replace corrosion and needs further attention, aka panel beating, else the plywood liner on the inside will be damaged. Finally for the afternoon the torque converter was dropped in to D1387.

Andrew had commitments on Saturday with grandson and an imminent birthday, and although I intended to go down to the shed at least for a while, I got engrossed in CAD and spent most of New Years Day at my desk. Back in YEC days, when I first started doing repowers and remanufactures in my own right, I designed a simpler, cheaper clutch bracket arrangement than had been the norm at Hills. You saw much of it on RS8. One of the first major tasks when I got to grips with CAD was to design a version for the 10,000 series converter rather than the 11500 series, and as D1387 is having a 10,000 I decided to revisit what I did back then, now almost 22 years back.

Much earlier in some R-R paperwork I was reading though at Hills, I had come across refrence to 'Enplan'. I was intrigued and asked Bill Burgess the Drawing Office manager, what it was. He explained that Enplan had been a cost curbing exercise. Every section of the build list had been examined by a small committee whose task was to decide how much that section 'ought' to cost and ultimately therefore, what the complete loco should cost as opposed to what it did then. By creating a target cost, design and production functions would get together to see where the actual man hours and materials accrued, and reduce them by simplifying (for quicker manufacture) and reducing component counts. Of course, they might decide that no reduction could be achieved, but they could nearly always see ways of extracting some cost and as such it was probably an example of what came to be called 'Management by Objectives' though it is not fashionable today.

Enplan appealed to me and I wanted to know why Hills didn't adopt it. One of the cost accountants told me that it had: before I arrived they had had a 'Cost Reduction Committee' whose role was to do the same thing. The accountant had been invited on; he came from a volume manufacturing background and so started suggesting things like 'economic batch quantities' he told me. He wasn't asked to attend again. I tried my bit. Handrails were a bugbear. The man hours racked up kitting each loco with unique handrails - even successive locos with the same superstructure had the handrails individually made on the loco, not even pre-assembled in the fab shop. Hunslet threw together handrails using Kee-Klamp and flimsy tubing. Ours were formed out of 1 inch bore steel tube and box section uprights. Each upright was welded to a base plate which was then bolted to a matching tapped plate welded to the loco running plate. I found a UIC standard for handrails which showed that ours were way more sophisticated. I argued that nobody ever took the handrails off (if the loco was having a power unit change, they'd leave them on to prevent the fitters falling backwards) and therefore they should be simplified, pre-assembled and welded to the loco running plate. Did I get anywhere? I think one loco went out with a simpler handrail arrangement (a token gesture, not my full spec) but the next was a repeat order and everything returned to 'normal'.

So, when I came to do things myself I questioned everything. The complicated Thomas Hill clutch cylinder bracket (which originated with Rolls-Royce of course) was simplified to two pieces of steel plate, one folded to make it stiff. Instead of a complicated machined pivot piece for the top of the cylinder, I opted to buy the standard parts produced by the cylinder manufacturer, and where Hills had a special machined piece between the piston rod and clevis, so as to be adjustable as the clutch wore over time, I chose to use a longer-stroked cylinder which therefore shouldn't run out of travel through the life of the clutch. Thus I looked back at the drawings I had produced in 2000 for the 10,000 series converter that I was fitting to a remanufactured loco I was then supplying to Ford in Belgium. I told myself I was just checking my work, after all, my expertise with CAD has improved a bit over the intervening years. Rather than ask our favourite fabricators to make these parts (it needs a bender) could I change them into 2 or 3 laser cuts we could assemble here? The result took a chunk of the day, as I dug out the cylinder drawings, redrew the cylinder (to make sure it really was correct) and then kept playing about turning it through a few degrees this way and that until a fresh solution presented itself. Now the clutch cylinder bracket became a single laser-cut, half of the cylinder manufacturer's pivot is superceeded by an M20 bolt and although I'm adding a stiffener along one side, I'm not really sure it would need it. It should be cheaper, simpler and aesthetically more pleasing. If it were 'Enplan', it would be a success.

I was down again at the shed today with a print of the proposed bracket to check against the converter. A piece of paper is quicker and cheaper than a laser profile. But after that it was a rather mundane day. On Friday I had been recovering the bolts as we took bits off the 6QT on the basis that if they are undamaged and can be cleaned up it would save buying new. Dorman, like Rolls, used UNF throughout and our imperial stocks are not as plentiful. Andrew would prefer to buy new, arguing that we have boxes and boxes of 'unknowns'. That's true, and I thought it might be an idea to start sorting some of them and help tidy the place up a bit. In fact, fairly early on I found two boxes which turned out to be entirely full of half inch BS Whitworth. I identified them by means of a tap, and having done so started cleaning out the nuts with the tap to get rid of the rust. But after the first 40 or so clamping the nut in the vice and winding the tap I decided to clamp the tap in the vice and wind the nut down with a spanner. Ten or fifteen later after the spanner had flown across the room a couple of times I dug out a socket and employed Big Mak, and when that got too boring started on some of the bolts using a die nut instead of a tap. D1387's handrails are bolted to the loco buffer beams with half inch Whits so a number were cleaned up and re-deployed - the front handrail was assembled back to the loco a couple of weeks ago using a mixture of whatever Andrew had found. The rear handrail, destroyed in the crash, has base pads awaiting developments but insufficient bolts: they are now fully secured. Andrew was feeling a little under the weather so the appearance of a couple of Peak Rail S&T volunteers for a cuppa was welcome and I showed off the interior of the cement van. Towards the end of the afternoon I loaded things in to the van ready for the restart of normal business on Tuesday, but really there was little to photograph over the weekend so apologies for the lack of illustration.

Anyway, Happy New Year to you all, let us hope it will be better than the last couple. I'll be back next Sunday, touch wood, see ya then.