Of pump and battery

12th November 2023

A quck read thsi week, I fear.,

It has been a quiet week. Well it must have been, I don't seem to have taken any photos at all, though that might be in part because what we have done has been in fading light.

But I left you with a cliffhanger last week - would 'Micra man' turn up on Monday? And the answer was 'no'. Late Monday evening I sent him a fairly firm text requesting that he contact me with a date and time that I could rely on him to honour.

No reply.

Egged on by Andrew I tried phoning him on Tuesday. It rang out then went to voicemail. But he saw the 'missed call' and sometime later rang me back - only to cut the connection as soon as I answered and said my name. Did he not think that I knew whom it was by the number on my screen? We concluded that 'Micra man' was a w****r and was reneiging on the deal. So the Micra was relisted, was duly sold and collected by a dealer in London within 48 hours.

We had Andy H due in again on Saturday and the logical thing was that he continued with the Terrypicker changing the shed lights but this time on row C (the far side, towards the footpath, which as Andrew observed was the side 'on which we did the most work'). But there was a lot of 'stuff' on that side and even just wheeling the Terrypicker across outside would be a mammoth undertaking. Andrew's solution was of course, to clear enough space to land said Terrypicker after picking it up with the Hatramm's crane. So an early evening shunt was undertaken which, after first unloading my van of some re-railing jacks which Andrew had collected the night before from Etches Park, meant Louise coming across from track 1, shunting the locos in to the shed on 3B to collect Des, pulling the whole lot out and clear so that RS8, towing L173, could move up behind them sufficiently to enable the Hatramm to come out of 3A and back down 3B. There its crane reached out, lifted the Terrypicker up, over and delicately into the place we'd cleared on 3B. Then everything had to be reversed back into their starting places.

I forgot to mention last week that we had another 'do' with Tony's railcar in his absence. Having bought it a new lift pump, which unlike its original felt to have a proper pump-feel to it throughout the stroke rather than just at the bottom. We thought it would be straightforward to mount it, crank it enough to fill the injector lines and just get it to fire. Wrong. Once again we could prime it as far as the fuel pump easily by hand but under engine crank nothing happened. So we disconnected the outlet pipe of the lift pump and cranked again. It should have p*****d fuel out but no, after a momentary spurt nothing came out of the lift pump at all. Aside from an exceedingly strange fault within the engine (unlikely) this does rather point to a defect within the suction side to the fuel tank, and first candidate was an air leak somewhere. The rigid pipework is after all getting old and one way to prove it would be to change the suction pipe for a fresh plastic or rubber hose. But the lift pump has ports threaded 1/2 UNF.

Now, for the furtherance of your education, whilst our dear cousins over the Atlantic have their version of BSP taper known as NPT, they don't have a parallel thread version. Instead they use (generally) UNF threads and their equivalent to our hydraulic coned fittings is their JIC (for Joint Industries Council and pronounced Jick) and distinctive in that the protruding cone is on the male fitting whereas ours is within the female. Oh, and I said generally? They also have some other fitting forms such as ORFS (O-ring flat seal) and you'll often find drain plugs on sumps in a fine thread form called UNS (Unified special)- try asking for that in a hardware store. Anyway ... the pipework to this lift pump is a copper pipe with an olive and tube nut and we certainly don't carry fittings that go from 1/2 UNF to hoses. In fact I try to avoid JIC altogether, so standard practice is to find an adaptor, in this case a 1/2 inch JIC to 1/4 BSP parallel, two of which (made in China) arrived on Friday. As yet we haven't had time to go any further.

Andy duly arrived on Saturday morning and after a bit more clearance of clutter, the Terrypicker was wheeled up from its landing place to the front of the shed by Des and he ascended to start on the lights again. Andrew wanted to attack the ferry van. Over half the van is stacked with stillages with all manner of parts therein and we were after one particular item which was in a stillage at the farthest end of the 'van. The technique for this is to draw the train on road 1 forward until the ferrry van door is opposite the area just at the front of the shed so that it can be accessed by the forklift. The ferry van doorway can - just - pass two stacked stillages with an inch or two to spare and the 6ft forks on the forklift mean that we can drag and uplift them from half way across the van floor. After clearing a bit of space Andrew lifts a pallet truck up into the van, and it is my job to bring these stillages forward and to position for lifting. Well, OK, the stillages are heavy, the van floor is no longer a nice smooth surface and frequently Andrew has to come up and assist, but at least I can stand back and watch the forklift pirouetting to and fro as Andrew turns around and finds somewhere to park these two stillages before pulling out the next two, and so on.

Additional interruptions are from Andy H, who, having completed the change of one lamp, requests that we restore the circuit breaker for a few seconds to check it lights up before he closes off the junction box and moves on to the next: which may of course, require us to work together, clearing more things aside so that the Terrypicker can be rolled further down the shed and re-stabilised. Thus accessing the last stillage in the corner, removing the desired item (a 3-pot exhauster) filling the resultant space with another component which had nowhere to call home, and returning all the stillages (not neccessarily in the same order or combination as Andrew tries to anticiipate what we may require to get at first next time) occupied most of our working day, in between tea-breaks and setting the preservation world (and maybe even the main line operators) to rights.

By the end of the day though, flicking the switches for the lights on rows B and C make a truly bright impression. Our old lighting had seemed good when first commissioned (and it was when compared to a string of 110V/60watt bulbs up one wall) but with twice the wattage and better quality LED units, the new bay lights are almost dazzling. Row A may have to wait until the W&L loco has gone and we can clear the track for the Terrypicker, but our main working areas are substantially brighter.

Sunday, and Andrew was back late leaving me alone to potter about for the morning. You may recall that some weeks ago I bought some replacement battery packs for the Makita tools that were stolen in July and ended up with 3 'duff' ones that wouldn't take a charge. The supplier did replace one, but went stumm when more of his supply were reported also defective - maybe he thought that I was trying to diddle him. I discussed this with Andy H a few weeks ago and his opinion was that Chinese manufacturers didn't treat quality assurance as we do, they knock'em out cheap and if a few fail, they simply send out more. It's cheaper than batch testing and employing people whose role, looked at cynically, is to interrupt production. Given what they cost, he argued, and the value of my time, bin them and buy more. That probably made financial sense but I have a latent hoarding instinct that refuses to throw things away without good reason. So in the end I invested in some extended Torx bits so that I could reach the screws, and opened up a battery pack.

The guts of the thing turned out to be two rows of 5 cells, each 3.6V and stacked alternately so that each layer went pos neg, pos neg, pos neg. pos neg, pos neg. Each cell had a bonded bus bar to its neighbour but each layer was also bonded to the other layer at each junction, so the first bonding I examined had all 4 bonded together, two +ve ends bonded to the next two -ve ends, top and bottom. A survey with a voltmeter revealed that 4 out of 5 pairs of cells were showing voltage, but one pair, the first two at the -ve end, showed about 0.1volt. So I opened up a second and that survey showed that the pair at the opposite end, were also returning less than a quarter volt. And there the matter had rested until today, when I took all 3 down to the shed and set up the Weller soldering iron. The first battery pack bequeathed its +ve end pair by gently cutting through the bonding with a junior hacksaw (a piercing saw would have been better but that was at home) after unsoldering the wire from its tab. A similar operation on the other battery and the serviceable pair were put back into place and the cut tabs soldered together. Trying not to drop the screws (and still losing one) I secured top and bottom casings back togther, pressed the charge level test button and it all lit up (it wouldn't before) so plugged it on to a nearby drill and it seemed to function. I've marked the casing so I know it is a repair job in case it gives any problems, but after carrying out a slightly more complex operation on a mid-way pair of cells on the third battery, I now have two battery packs* functioning seemingly normally instead of going to landfill, and a couple of more pairs of serviceable cells in stock if any more give trouble. (* Or very recognisable if they get stolen...) Yeah for green me.

Apart from that it was a bit of a bitzer day with a few minor jobs, measure ups, etc. Andrew had dug out a 3-phase motor from the ferry van, he wants to produce a power pack to run the rerailing jacks in workshops without the noise and fumes of the Hatz engine that comes with the set. He had a motor of the right power, complete with a bell housing and a hydraulic pump (but no info as to the latter's displacement, so will need replacing) but no obvious means of mounting. A close look showed the solution, though I need to measure it up and prepare a profile. Outside the rain was falling steadily, an altogether depressing day that reinforces my dissatisfaction with this time of year. Meanwhile Adam had asked me to defer transport jobs for another week - so at least I won't neccessarily be out and about in Storm Debi. Hopefully however there'll be something more photogenic that I'll have time to capture and summat to say next week. See ya then.