Steam Locomotive Stoker Engine Restoration - Part 2: Removing the Cylinder Head

[Music] hello Keith Rucker your village machinery org guys today we're going to be back working on our steam stoker engine we've just started this one up a week or so ago and got it cleaned up and I'm ready now to start working on taking this thing apart and I really want to be kind of careful about how I do it document everything real well one thing I'll say anytime I'm disassembling a machine I like to take lots of pictures of it one advantage of me shooting video is is I have a video record that I can go back to which is really helpful but anytime you're taking something complicated like this apart take time to document it I've already been around this with my camera taking a gazillion photographs because I guarantee you I'll be going back and looking at those when it goes back together because I won't remember exactly how something goes up goes in another thing that I'll be doing while I'm doing this is I'm going to be bagging and tagging parts so I've got little ziplock bags and I'll be taking stuff off putting them in a bag writing where those parts came from so that I can make sure the same parts go back in the same place one thing very often you take something apart you got a bunch of different bolts through the same size but different links you go to put them back together there's like okay well this one will fit was it the right one or would should be these longer ones or shorter ones just save yourself the trouble document everything bag and tag everything it'll make it much easier when you go back together so today I think what I want to try to do is get the head removed off of this so the cylinders are moved off of this so let me zoom you in here and I kind of show you what we're dealing with and we get started on it if you look at the way this is built you got the section back here with all the crank case the piston rods connecting rods all that and then on the very front you have the cylinders and they're actually bolted in this is a separate casting so I think thank game plan today is we're going to try to get this off now I'm expecting some challenges these cylinder odds and the Pistons are actually froze up right now so I really can't move them around so this may be a little bit challenging to get those out we got the Val it's down here below it same type thing I got to get them out and just don't know exactly what we're gonna be running into will be just taking it one one step at a time there's a series of bolts back here that basically connect the two castings in theory we should be able to loosen everything up and just slide it off now I'm gonna show you in the front of the cylinders here you can kind of see the piston our Pistons the actual Pistons piston rods come up through the actual piston this is the piston it's just a cast iron I'm gonna call it a disk it's a little bit more complicated than that but it slides in and out up and down in here this has got a castle nut on the top it has a cotter pin in here and hopefully the game plan is is I'm gonna remove the bolts and I'm gonna hope when we come out we're just gonna leave the piston actual Pistons in side the cylinders for now and I'll work on getting those out a little bit later same thing down here with the valves these are the two valves same setup so that's kind of my game plan I'm hoping this is going to come apart without too much trouble let's do it and see what happens all right so first thing I need to do is get this cotter pin out and open this isn't going to be too much for trouble they took it and just bent it straight back in on the piston looks like it's bending out we got it coming she wants to be stubborn I'm gonna put a set of vise grips in here let's see if I can hammer it out this way it's coming there we go all right cotter pin is out now I see how hard it's gonna be to get that castle nut off first thing I want to do is there's some penetrating oil on it this is some of that uh CRC knocker loose I really like this stuff been using it for a little while and I would put it up there with the best of the penetrating oils I've used I've got an inch and 13/16 socket on here oh boy that is make sure just making sure it wasn't left-hand threads for some obscure reason so I think we're gonna go take two here on the in these bolts loose just see you know off-camera I went in and I removed all of the cotter pins on all four of these and they're all just really stuck hard so don't apply some heat I've got my torch we're gonna fire this thing up and see if I can't break them loose that way so let me get my torch going just got a little rosebud here and it's gonna apply some heat to that out or nut a lot of times when you get a stuck bolt like this put some heat on there would cause it to kind of swell up a little bit and loosen up just the movement from the heat will cause it to break loose I'm not trying to turn it red hot although I can if I have to but we're just gonna put some heat heat in here first and see if that'll do the trick come in here now not enough yet fine more heat so if you're worried about the heat messing up tempers and so forth like that I'm planning on replacing this nut I'm gonna make a new nut I'm gonna make a new piston rod that leaves the cast iron piston and cylinder head and the heat really won't interfere with the cast iron stuff but all the steel stuff we're going to be replacing anyway so I'm really not worried about messing up any of tempers or anything in here all right I'm starting to see some red out here on these outer parts of that nut put a little bit more in there alright let's try it again I'm gonna put a cheater bar on it there it goes that's what it took and that one is out alright we're going to do the same process on the other three nuts there and try to get them all off we've got that one yeah alright didn't even need the cheater bar on that one see how we get this last one out there it goes another little tip when you're taking something like this apart is leave plenty of what I call witness marks so that you again you know how things go back together now this engine has clearly been in two before and there are plenty of witness marks that were left here by other people before me particularly up here so they took a center punch but one dot there one dot here one one so all these parts are showing over here on the valve rod one one there's two not dots here two dots two dots two dots so I've kind of got one dot two dot up here on the head or on the cylinders there's really only one way this can go on but just to be on the safe side I'm going to leave witness marks so I'm going to put some punch marks in here this is the two side so I just put matching March there and that way when I put this back together I'll match my twos up this side will be one so same thing so real easy way and you see this little trick all the time on when you're taking something apart where someone's done it before you it was a good little trick anyway there you go now let's look on see what need to do to get this head off so next step is I need to get the nuts off back here cylinders here there's studs that come through here we got nuts on this side there are eight nuts per cylinder holding them on I need to get these off so it's an inch and a quarter nut on there and these are on here tight I'm going to use a lead hammer here [Music] I'm getting broken loose and coming apart and I probably ought to squirt these down with some penetrating oil I see we can get these on off now I think I'm gonna leave the top one it's own for right now just to hold them in place it looks like the whole studs gonna come out with this one but that's alright I'm probably going to replace all these studs and nuts anyway so no biggie whatever comes loose first it'll come loose so the studs are just basically threaded on both sides so side with the least friction is going to be what breaks loose first there we go I think we're about ready to take let's try to take these cylinders off so let me get these two last remaining nuts bail that stone here just for safety sake I didn't think it was gonna come off but I got it all rigged up now with the hoist so it's not gonna go anywhere so let's get these out of here all the other nuts I have already removed all right so now I'll take my lead hammer see if I can kind of break this thing loose some of the couple these nuts back on here so that I can actually tap on these and see if I can push it loose these nuts and studs are going to be replaced so I'm not worried about hurting them but we'll hit them with the lead hammer it shouldn't hurt them anyway all right it's gonna be stubborn let me study this a few minutes before we mess anything up so I've been struggling with getting this head off that's just really being stubborn so I'm resorting to using some pressure in here I've got two of my machinist Jack's in here these are basically two tons screw jacks so four tons between the two of them I put a ball on a couple of studs this is really the only place that I can fit these in here they're kind of in the middle I'd like to have them maybe in a couple other places but I'm gonna see if I can apply enough pressure to break these thing loose now so they're not wanting to sit perfectly flat up against that other side over there but maybe we can get these to work anyway get this cylinder to come loose being stubborn I've got a machinist wedge here I can just get it in there it'll start on this side yeah that's opening up there all right we're making progress here I'm starting to see some light of day through here but it's still being stubborn I can pull these jacks on out some more they didn't gotten loose all right we're making progress and I think I see what the issue is there are two dowel pins one here and one here that are in here to help align this when it lines goes in and I think that they're really just kind of stuck in those dowel pins I think once we get past those dowel pins it's probably going to come on out I've got a light shining down through here I don't see any other dowel pins although I suspect they're very well be maybe a couple on the bottom so I've got three wedges one on the top on the side one on the bottom on each side I've been bumping this thing around just kind of I'll tap a couple of them go around trying to keep even pressure on everything and slowly work this thing out this thing is proving to be a lot more stubborn than I ever thought it would have been but we are making progress I've gone to some bigger wedges over here as I continue to wedge things out I lost a wedge on the other side that's coming nicely once again we're gonna have a changing game plan I have decided it's made the executive decision I'm going to do what they told me I was gonna have to do to begin with I was trying to save these piston rods in these valve stem rods down here but I've got drawings form I know the dimensions I know everything about them too I'm gonna have to remake them anyway so when I got this they told me that I was going to have to to cut these to get the head off and that's what we're going to do we're just going to cut them and then everything should just come out at the top so these are just some packing glands I want to go ahead and just unscrew these get them out of the way there's a gland there I'll cut it on this side of it go ahead and get the other one over here okay and we also got some down here at the bottom with these for these valves come in here with a saw big one here get down and get this little one yes got that one through and I'm glad to get some more blades it took me two blades to get through those two pieces and I'm out so off to the store all right we are cut through all four of the pieces wedges are all loose now get this to come out you can see the gaps opening up in the down here on the cylinder rods now so it's definitely coming out I need to get over here and push on different stud get a bigger jack other one was running out of reach it's the only reason I'm swapping them here so she's got we are really really close now it's a wedge falling out all right the head is off Alleluia that's some copper gaskets I miss when I'm up we'll have to make new ones Oh big deal see what these cylinders look like on the inside so let's take a look at the cylinder here now that we got this off actually the inside of this area is a lot cleaner than the outside there's a pretty severe pitting on the other side this one of course is that bottom dead center are close to it so it's really not going to matter on that one looking at the other side I'm pretty sure I'm gonna end up having to board and sleeve these cylinders but I'll know more once I get in there start taking some measurements on it now one thing I will note is what my flaw to plan to begin with and and honestly if I had done some a little bit of homework ahead of time I probably could have avoided this but what was happening when we were pulling these apart it was actually pulling the whole Pistons and everything in the cylinders down toward me so we had all the friction inside the cylinder diseased Pistons are I mean they'll move but they're in there tight right now there's no lubrication there's rust and pitting and all that in there they're on the on the front side here you know we had the screws that we took off and I was assuming it would just pull right through but when I started looking at the blueprints on these cylinder rods what I discovered is there's actually a taper on the backside that goes into the bottom of the piston and then it's tightened up on that taper so these are actually wedged into a taper it's just like a like a Morse taper on a lathe once it gets seated I mean it's a really tight fit so it wasn't just gonna pull apart real easily I might have been able to take a hammer or something and bump them and knock them out but also might have busted the cylinders or the Pistons rather in the so just cutting the cylinder rods was the answer and ironically when I picked this thing up from the folks up in Nashville they told me that to get this thing apart I was gonna have to cut the cylinder rods and it was no big deal cuz we're gonna have to make him anyway so no harm done I got the blueprints we can redo them they were not salvageable but I was really hoping I could get them apart without doing that well there you go guys cylinder head is removed cylinders are off the stoker engine and that honestly was a lot more work than I was expecting and as I get into this I'm realizing that this thing has got a lot of work to do to it I think it's restorable it's just gonna take a lot of lot of effort a lot of this this stuff is even pitted and damaged worse than I thought coming into it but again like I've mentioned in my previous videos the stuff is in bad shape is the steel parts the cast looks decent so I really think that this is gonna be salvageable I'm gonna have to remake just about everything steel on this part on this whole stoker engine but we got the tools and equipment to do that and we can sew and we will and I've got the blueprints I've got the documentation so this before it's just awful nice to have the original blueprints with all the specs and all the tolerances even the types of materials that most of the stuff was made out of hardness information all that stuff I've got it so we can restore this back with confidence that we're doing it right which really kind of makes me feel good so what's next I think I'm going to work on just continuing to disassemble everything at some point in time I'm gonna have to get these Pistons out of the cylinders they are more or less rusted in place but that we were moving it with just with the wedges and stuff so I feel pretty confident that we can probably press those out without too much trouble and hopefully without damaging anything it's just gonna be takes a some time and effort to do it but that's what we're here for that's gonna be rap guys as always thanks for watching comments are always appreciated please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and guys we'll catch you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 65,942

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, no. 576, restoration videos

Id: HHGfsK7o_WM

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019