Steam Locomotive Stoker Engine Restoration: Part 1 - Cleaning

[Music] hello Keith froggy here Vince machine dot-org guys today I'm gonna be introducing you to a new project that we're gonna be starting on in the shop and yes I am working on the metal planer that's back behind me this is still gonna be something we're working on but I'm glutton for punishment I won projects not enough I got to have two things going on simultaneously yes I'm crazy but this is something I need to get started on so what is this first off this is a collaboration project that I'm doing with some some guys I met a while back I'm actually gonna be working with the Nashville Steam Preservation Society in Nashville Tennessee on a project the guys up there are actually starting on I've been actually working on it for about a year now working on restoring a gigantic full-size mainline steam locomotive that was built back in the 1940s early 1940s and ran for about ten years and setting in a park up in Nashville Tennessee for the last 60 70 years however long it's been and they've gone and retrieved this locomotive brought it in and have started the process of tearing it down and doing a complete restoration on that locomotive to get it back up to operating condition where they can use it on the rails up there around the Nashville Tennessee area this right here is actually part of that steam locomotive this is a what you would call an appliance that was on there it was a it was not the actual had gotten to do with the actual running of the locomotive directly but it kind of helped the locomotive run and what this is this is a stoker engine it's actually a steam engine again it doesn't power the Train but what it powers is an auger that's up in the tinder of the locomotive the Tinder's where they carry the water and the coal and that auger actually feeds coal from the tender up into the firebox basically this replaced the back in the old days the firemen having to be on there with a shovel and shoveling the coal in there they could discern some valves on it would turn the steam engine on which road in this case in the tender of the locomotive sometimes these were actually on the locomotive themselves but this they would turn it on it would turn that all grown and would start augering coal up into the firebox so this one here is I think they've actually got two of these there was one that was on the locomotive they've acquired another one they were again they were an appliance he would just go out and get these usually the manufacturer of the locomotive didn't make these it was just something you could order and most of the railroads use similar appliances from one railroad to the other but this is one this is I think actually their spare I don't think this is the one that was in the locomotive they're gonna restore this one probably put it in the locomotive and they asked me to work with them and asked me if I would be so kind as to do this restoration project I'm excited about it this is gonna be a lot of fun so let me kind of just show you the engine a little bit game plan for today is I just want to start getting this thing cleaned up we're gonna pressure wash it we're gonna use some degreaser on it get all the old grime and gunk and there's literally just stuff down and sediment down the bottom of this thing where it's been sitting for years and I think what I'm going to do is we're gonna put it in a vat of evapo rust and let it do its magic on this and then bring it out and in future videos we'll start disassembling it figuring out what all it's got to be done and do a complete restoration to get this back up and going so let's show you what what we got here all right just kind of taking a look down on it I will say there is a cover that covers all this up it's just a sheet metal cover I've got the original we I'm not sure if I'm gonna try to salvage that one or just make a new and it's got a few issues on it but this is the the crankcase in there this is a little bit unusual from a steam-engine perspective if at least first like a stationary steam engine we got it as twin cylinder we got two cylinders us here and here these are quartz of the piston rods the Pistons are running up here in the cylinders the heads are off I've got them but they're not on here currently the piston diameter is seven inches it's got about an eight inch stroke and again there's two of them and just like on a steam locomotive they're quartered so that every revolution of this thing you're getting per for power strokes which is kind of cool this is going to require a lot of work there's a lot of a lot of rust a lot of deterioration down here at least on the steel parts the cast iron parts are in pretty decent shape and I think we'll be fine my anticipation before even tearing into this I'm going to probably have to replace pretty much all of the hardware in here the nuts the bolts again the steel parts because they've rusted so bad cast stuff is probably alright piston rods these are gonna have to be replaced or heavily pitted and it's just a piece of steel that goes in there I don't know about bearings yet just gonna have to get in here and see what we got I'm not even sure what style of bearings this asset looks like maybe brass or bronze bearings in here from what I can tell so in operation again unlike most steam engines this one here actually ran and they had all down in the bottom of this this case in here very similar to like a gasoline engine and you have these all slingers on here there's not two here and there's two on this one and what happens is when this swings around the oil goes into this little it scoops it in there and when it slings it back up these are just splash and all all over the inside of this again there's a cover on here to keep the oil contained and the oil is just going to splash and there's places in here where the oil gets down into the bearings and of course down here in the bottom everything's just running these two pieces here these are the the valve rods that basically turned the valves on and off in there so that the steam is ported to the correct place in steam engine and we should be able to get into all that a little bit deeper when we start taking this thing apart it's a pretty interesting engine there's you can't see it from there but over on this backside here there's a big square connector coming out here and that's what actually connected to the drive shaft that powered the auger that goes up into the locomotive so anyway let's uh let's get this thing outside like I said I want to pressure wash it clean it up there's literally just you know all this dirt and trash dried up all it's pretty pretty nasty I want to get cleaned up before we do anything else and I think the pressure washer is gonna be the easiest way to do that so before we get started on this just real quickly what I've done is I've come out here and used some degreaser on here just put it on there real nice and thick and just been letting it sit for a little while I've got the pressure washer with the turbo tip on it guys I know if you watch my channel regularly you probably know I've got a sandblaster attachment for this pressure washer I am NOT using that on this I'm just pressure watching this all we're doing so let's fire up main thing here get dirt grease all grime all that off that's really what I'm concentrated on let's do it all right I think we have got this thing pretty well cleaned out there's a hole or drain I guess is a better way of saying it down in the bottom of this crankcase and I've opened the plug so I've got everything draining out at the bottom and I don't know there's still a bunch of crud have to get in here do some scraping and brushing and I think we're ready to give this thing a bath over here in the evapo rust tank so I've got my my gantry crane in here I got a chain sling on here four-point chain sling to pick this up with we got lifting eyes in the engine itself and back behind me I've got my tank of evapo rust rust remover I actually built this tank for this job in mine that was the whole reason behind this it's been a while I've had this for a while this project here has been kind of on hold for a while because of some logistic issues I have with lifting and just being able to handle this engine but we are ready to go so I'm go ahead and start pulling her up here with the gantry cranes I think that was clear let's go ahead and pull this on back over the tank I think we're ready to come down now all right we're going into the tip now I can see the water bubbling up through the hole in the bottom down there there she goes completely underwater now it looks like sitting on the bottom so I'll go ahead and pull the things out this evapo rust is safe to handle don't have to worry about it hurting your hands or anything like that see some air bubbling up down there alright alright we're gonna put the lid back on this and let it sit do it stuff I'll probably take a peek at this tomorrow let it cook overnight and look at it we may leave it in here for a couple of days just depending on how bad it is when we pull it back out so we're just gonna let it sit overnight we've been soaking overnight with the soaker engine in the evapo rust pour out into it look fly let that water drain out of the center but yeah this is a pretty amazing actually we still got a little bit of this surface crud on this but it's just wiping right off just got a piece of scotch brite pad here yeah this is pretty amazing we clean this thing up probably what I'm going to do is just rub it down and then take it outside and hit it with that pressure washer again all right we've dripped dried here a few minutes let's see if we can get this over the palate now [Music] [Music] well guys pressure washing did an amazing job cleaning this thing up it was almost really kind of amazing out there just watching it wash away all that stuff that was just left on here from the rust in fact some of it almost looks like it's been sandblasted when actually it hasn't been so I was real happy with how well the evapo rust worked when I got it back in what I did was we got it up off the pallet I just used the gantry train again we picked it up and you can see now I've got it sitting on a steel stand this is just a little stand I welded up literally out of some scrap iron some angle iron and what have you and what it does is it gets it up does two things it gets it up to a level where I can work on it and not be working off the floor and actually up on some of my work benches was a little bit too high so I was able to kind of get it a nice comfortable level for me to work out but the second thing it does is I can come in here with a pallet jack now and just go up underneath this little stand that I built and I can move this around the shop very easily on the pallet jack so let me kind of zoom you in here I want you to see the job that the vapo Russ did particularly after we pressure washed it and got it cleaned up so you're looking down kind of inside the engine now and again this stuff in here looks almost like it's been sandblasted but all we did was remove the rust off of it I will say that after bringing it in here it has got a little bit of flash rust on it just from where it was how the raw material was exposed to the weather and yeah we got a little bit of flash press I squirted it down with some wd-40 just to try to protect it a little bit but that flash rust will clean right off when we start we're going to take everything out of here it's gonna get cleaned up again before we actually put it back together so I'm not too worried about any of that but man just look at the job amazing just by dipping it in there and a lot of our work is done for us right here now I will comment to that just looking at the stuff that has there's pretty badly damaged in here pretty much any of the steel parts like the nuts the studs anything like that lots of pitting lots of erosion lots of material gone away this nut down here I mean it's hardly got anything left on it on the sides so it looks like pretty much all of the steel parts that are in here gonna have from pretty well replace it but most obvious just hardware that shouldn't be an issue at all I'm sure there's gonna be some stuff I have to remake once we get in here and start looking at it hopefully the castings will be in good shape and the castings generally speaking are in good shape not much pitting yeah they were pretty heavily rusted but they're in the grand scheme of things I think gonna be salvageable as they are but steel parts yeah we're gonna have to remake those probably and find a bunch of hardware to go back in here so good news is is that the guys up at Nashville scene I'm going to be working with on this project collaborating with they were able to send me a lot of documentation on this engine they've got blueprints they've got manuals they've got a lot of the specs and stuff in here so even stuff I do have to remake and even parts that I have to replace I've actually got documentation I can go back to and really find out exactly what it needs to be tolerances those kinds of things I think I'm I'm being pretty good shape there I haven't really delve into that too hard yet but I got digital copies and it's a lot of material that they were able to dig up on this original manufacturer specs and stuff like that so that's gonna be great that's unusual I normally don't have that kind of information but I'm doing a restoration I'm usually flying by the seat of my pants but I think on this particular thing here we're gonna have a good bit of documentation to really help that process so thank you so much Nashville esteem for beating that information up for me gonna make my job much much easier I'm sure so that's pretty much gonna be a wrap I will mention that back in the spring I have a chance to go up to Nashville visit the locomotive they were doing some restoration work and I shot some video up there I'm gonna just go ahead and edit that as a separate video that you guys can go watch probably just post them both live today on the same day that I post this video so I will say there was a little bit of background noise it was a working set there we were working on it really wasn't a very controlled place to go and shoot a video but you can kind of get an idea on the locomotive this is going on and a little bit of its history which is quite interesting up in Nashville Tennessee really excited to be working with the guys at Nashville's team on this this is going to be a fun project and hoping to get back up there a couple of times during their restoration process this is going to be a multi-year project for them they told me this this restoration on the actual locomotives gonna be several years in the making so as far as this particular part of that it gives me a lot of flexibility this isn't a rush job by any means something I can come in and work on a little bit at a time and get it knocked out and that's kind of the game plan this will give me something that I can work on kind of simultaneously while I'm working on a few other projects guys that's gonna be a wrap on this video as always thanks for watching please leave comments if you like thumbs up are always appreciated and subscribe to the channel if you have it already and we'll catch you on the next video thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 105,604

Rating: 4.9588237 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Metalworking, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, steam engine, steam locomotive, nashville steam, stripe hype, stoker engine, No. 576, Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway No. 576, evapo rust, evaporust review, steam locomotive restoration, stroker engine build

Id: UhpVOHkCFnw

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019