Of being less unhinged

16th October 2022

The devil can be in the details. And they can drive you potty.

Like I said, an early start last Monday morning: I was on the road for 06.15, fuelled and leaving Bakewell at 06.30 but nevertheless I failed to get through before the early Monday morning Manchester traffic so it was just on noon when I reached my destination. Claire is back in action after an engine out and they wanted me to go over the electrics.

Thus I was on site for a little over 3 hours and then headed south, stopping at Abington to make some phone calls and reaching home just before 21.00. For the most part a pleasant drive but with over 500 miles occupying some 11 or 12 hours travelling I wonder how I would have coped driving an electric van with today's battery range. In all probablity it would have entailed a half-way stop of 40-60 minutes to re-charge and a third somewhere before setting off back - so pushing the travelling to 14+ hours or an additional overnight break.

Either way I was not anxious to go far on Tuesday but as it was my birthday and I had visitors due that wasn't going to happen. Much of the rest of the week has been involved in admin, aside fom Friday when, apart from a tour round a few suppliers picking up bits, I also made my first ever visit to the Matlock Town Football Ground for a 4th Covid jab.

Finally the belts for the Hudswell's alternator and the last elusive pulley arrived, although the latter has produced its own additional problem, as it is 'pilot bored', which is to say it has a hole in the middle. They don't specify what diameter that hole is, but on unpacking I hastily put a vernier across and discovered it was about 19mm. My pump requires the pulley to be a 1 in 8 taper with a maximum diameter of 17mm, in other words the 'ole is far too big. There are several solutions to this but none of them simple.

The replacement bobbins for the Hudswell's exhaust system arrived so the opportunity was taken one evening to swap them out and 'adjust' the exhaust pipework.

Steph's car failed MoT as the examiner found a hole where metal ought to be so that became Andrew's No.1 priority for the weekend. I started on Saturday by progressing the front end of the Hudswell, dropping the alternator belts into place and completing the coolant connections to and from the radiator, being the main top connection (blue), the 1inch by-pass line (red) plus a small bore bleed line from the top of the transmission cooler to above the nominal coolant level to allow trapped air to find its way to the highest point (not visible in the photo).

When Matt arrived (his recently acquired van being back in the garage for a replacement dual-mass flywheel) he set about drilling the packing pieces to lift the exhauster slightly on D1120 before moving on to the Hudswell to make a start on the casing doors. Hudswell casing doors are not their finest feature: well the doors themselves are satisfactory but each hinge comprises two pieces of thick-walled steel tube (one for the door, one on the casing frame) with a mild steel pin to join them. Without regular use (there is no practical means of lubrication) the pins and tube fuse together and on opening they get so stiff that finally the pins sheer. We've spent many man hours already with gas warming up the tubes and trying to drift the broken pins out but there were more in the casing doors that hadn't yet been tackled. Meanwhile all the budget locks were worn out so these have to be changed, but modern budget locks do not come with the same dimensions as they did fifty years ago so the doors require partially re-drilling and new packing pieces to space them to clear the casing frames.

This will be the fourth such loco we've tackled though it is proving to be the most awkward. The technique developed is to cut 12mm diameter bar to lengths of about 6 inches, hold it in place with a mole wrench and drill through the casing frame tube (which is the lower one) from the side and insert a mills or roll pin to retain it. The door is then lowered on to the exposed 'peg' and you can drip oil in to the top of the door's tube to keep the hinge lubricated. But with 8 doors to do it all takes time.

Over the years we have acquired bits which I bought 'but got wrong'. I mentioned ginmormous silencers in earlier editions but some of the smaller components are still with us. One such is a box in the container with push-pull throttle cables. I thought there were but two in it, one of which I recall buying for a certain 03 named Western Waggoner when I had it in under YEC's auspices to remove the tandem gear. Somehow I measured it but got it made far too long. The other was for another job where I hadn't learned to get it correct before ordering. Andrew persuaded me to open the box up and see if either were suitable for the Hudswell, and I did so convinced that they were far too lengthy. And 'they' were, but there was a third in there which I don't remember buying at all and that one looked as though it might be usable.

So I set about installing it. The original Hudswell thottle was a rod linkage: a rigid bar passing through the cab via an oversized hole, then a lever and vertical rotating shaft down the cab front to another lever and second push-pull bar horizontally to the fuel pump. Next to none of this had survived and in any event the torque converter oil reservoir lives there and the cable to the float switch on it passes hrough the same hole. Nevertheless I set about threading the new cable through the hole in the cab front and securing the inner to the throttle lever in the desk, This end turned out to be M6 and a suitable rod end was found in a collection I keep for these occasions.To anchor the outer at that end (else you pull or push and the whole thing, outer and inner, move together which doesn't work) I prepared a short L-shaped bracket to be tacked to the cab front and left the remainder for Sunday. I was also threading through a new fuel feed hose from the filters: I was going to joint it to the Hudswell original but as theirs was in imperial Enots fittings and darn hard to get nowadays, I decided instead to go all the way back to the tank, though it has meant lifting half the cab floor again.

Sunday, and Matt came up by train (and that too was late) so I picked him up at Matlock for a rather later start. Andrew had had a run out Saturday night to collect some purchases, including a second pipe bender. The first we acquired a couple of years ago but lacked half its rollers. Up to now when we've needed to use it it has been for pipe diameters where the rollers were present, but for the loco's rear handrails 3/4 inch tube was neccessary to match the front. Rollers for that size we didn't have and it was as easy to buy another s/h but with all rollers as to source rollers separately. In between further progress on the casing doors Matt resumed work on those rear handrails, making a fresh assembly to match that at the front. It requires just a little more work which we shall complete later.

Back at the throttle cable, I created two intermediate steadies using Stauff clamps and found to my surprise that the other end of the cable was not M6 but 1/4 inch UNF but again the assorted rod ends draw provided a suitable candidate. The fuel pipe from the filters to the fuel pump, which was not in the best of conditions anyway, was now obstructing the end of the throttle cable so I removed it and will manufacture a slightly longer one so as to drop well clear.

That just leaves securing the end of the outer cable to the bracket left for the purpose (so that the inner is forced to maintain a straight push) and maybe a bit of adjustment.

Andrew had a few jobs left on the car this morning after which he spent time on the 0-4-0 Fowler removing parts as we prepare to dispose of the carcass.

And that brings us about to the end of the week. The Hudswell is looking more and more like a finished loco (and not before time too) but other projects are progressing, both visibly and in the background. More on that next weekend, perhaps. See ya then.