Hi folks. been a while since I talked about the MEG. We have been very busy taking it to meets such as Bitter Creek and Portola Valley & Alpine and making various improvements to it.
After train mountain we worked on it a bit until the Bitter Creek Narrow Gauge Meet. A low profile hatch was cut into the center of the roof to allow for visibility of the steam gauge, and a number of other small tidbits were addressed.
It ran well at Bitter Creek (photos from there can be see on the BCWRR NG meet report:
http://www.chaski.org/homemachinist/vie ... 48#p252048 )
and I did some double heading there with Robert Morris' "Chu", a freelanced item that is a mash-up between a MEG and another European switcher from a magazine build series entitled "Call Me Elda". Chu is now owned by Phil Tucker.
Whilst double heading, an incident happened which has caused some revision to the reverse quadrant. I was drifting back down a hill in neutral, and as we leveled out I went to put the reverse in reverse to add power for backing up. When I pulled the J-bar back, the valve motion grabbed the lever out of my hand and jammed it all the way back, locking up the valve gear and rotating the return crank 15 degrees on the crankpin. I got towed back to the bays and I set the return crank correctly again, but it was then evident that stops would be needed to prevent the lever from going far beyond the normal range of travel.
As it turns out, a reverse quadrant connected to Hackworth is much more directly impacted by the motion of the rest of the gear than say Stephenson or Walchaerts. The latter two utilize the radial expansion links to set the valves, while Hackworth uses the slide, which is more vunerable to being pushed around by the combination lever when there is slack in the system. If you disconnect the reverse quadrant from a stephenson system for example, the radius links will just drop down and the locomotive will stay in full forward gear. If you do the same with a hackworth setup, the return crank will cause the combination lever and slide to just go bonkers.
I took the locomotive home and made two changes to the reverse quadrant. I added two stops that stop the advance of the J-bar when it travels 1/16" beyond the last notch in either direction. I also beefed up the plunger rod for the die block that goes into the notches. At 1/8" diameter it had become bent from the forces involved and is one of the reasons why the valve gear got away from me - the die block was stuck in the up position and the spring did not automatically return it down into a notch before traveling past all the notches and jamming up.
Next I tackled the fitting tree on the dome. The area available for ports on the dome cap is very small due to a very poor design of the dome and it's bolt pattern. Thus you cannot fit two safeties and a good sized whistle each in their own hole. The safeties end up being up against the whistle. A tree of fittings was made to branch two safeties out of one hole, but it ended up becoming ungainly. I replaced it with manifold that is also used for water fill. The manifold is hidden below the dome cover, and I lowered the whistle and replaced the not-very-controllable whistle valve with a ball valve that utilizes a rod to the cab for control.
The last thing that there was time for before the PV&A meet was to add some detailing and lettering.
I have a vinyl cutter and I designed and cut and assembled all my own graphics, same story as the boxcar. The gold color looks exactly like goldleaf from more than a foot away, I'm extremely pleased with it. I also used a deep red to get a victorian color scheme going for the letters. The "2" was based on a railroad roman #2 found on an 1800s locomotive at the California State Railroad Museum and the San Lorenzo logo is my own that I made up for the boxcar. (the company was a real company that operated in the Felton / Santa Cruz area of Northern California, but they did not leave a logo behind.)
The locomotive was a big hit with its new duds and improvements, and I have since switched it over to running australian char. It steams like a witch and easily keeps pressure up the long steady climb at PV&A, and loves drafting up the grades. It's very easy to make more steam than you need.
We did however come across a whole new set of slack problems in the valve gear, and now it is my dad's turn to have the engine between meets and he is taking the next tasks of shoring up the valve gear to get rid of the clanking resulting from spacers that are too loose, and a reach rod from the cab that needs a dog leg rather than a long spacer at one end to connect to the J-bar.
We are also still fiddling with the timing and may be making some adjustments to the valve outside and inside dimensions to make them the correct length for the spacing and travel at hand.
Water: It turns out that the water in the 11 gallon saddle tank is all you need even for train mountain. At TM I was able to easily go down the hill for a few hours and come back up without once taking on water and not using the additional 5 gal tank in the tender. At PV&A I could go at least half a day without filling the saddle tank. The result is that we will plumb both injectors to the saddle tank and eliminate the tender tank. Since it is a tank engine, I am going to eliminate the current riding tender cart this winter and build a more suitable ride car that is something gondola in nature. This should help the aesthetics quite a bit and will also allow more than one person to ride directly behind the engine. I have ordered a second truck from Steve Easlon as I currently only have the one on the tender-dolly.
The ball valve as whistle valve works well when I use the single note whistle, which I did on Sunday. This is a very unique and loud whistle and I will be leaving it on the engine full time from now on. My other whistle is an RMI 3 chime.
Here are some photos from PV&A and some work photos. See the descriptions for more information.
It's got the single note hooter whistle on it at the moment, which is being over-blown a little bit in the video. I also have an RMI 4 chime that I can put on it as well.