Our latest Build 11 work session was held on Monday through Wednesday, May 18 to 20.
We began our May work session by preparing the brake pot bracket holes for riveting – reaming and countersinking them. We see Gordon Cook, Harold Downey and Rick Sisson hard at work.We planned on locating our Hanna squeeze riveter as shown last month but for some reason the riveter only succeeded in pushing the rivet out of the hole! We reversed the riveter position, used normal, not flat head rivets, employed a snap sleeve fabricated by Gordon and formed the countersunk end of each rivet. This approach was quite successful. We completed the right-side bracket before we ran out of rivets. We’ll finish the job next work session.Here we see the outboard rivets, with factory formed heads.And the inboard rivets, with countersunk heads we formed.Earl Leavitt has continued working on the valve gear tumbling shaft. Earl has located and drilled the pillow blocks which secure the shaft to the frame. Harold Downey has been machining the rocker boxes and we see one located in position on the frame.Rick took some time out to secure the reverse button on our Milwaukee magnetic base drill. This button has been falling off the drill for some time, but now it’s good as new.Meanwhile Harold and Quentin Bethune took a look at our air compressor which failed. They removed both heads, looked for problems and found none and reinstalled the heads. We found a wiring discrepancy that was corrected and we are now investigating the pressure cutout switch.Joe Monty joined us to machine our rear coupler casting. This will be visible at the rear of the rear buffer beam that Marcel Levesque is currently fabricating for us.Earl is working with the links and link brackets to ensure they fit properly. The link brackets were made for us by a CNC vendor we found online.Our crossheads are mounted to the rear cylinder heads using a block having a tapered pin which mates with a tapered hole in the cylinder head. Noah MacAdam fabricated these blocks for us and left the taper slightly oversized. Quentin machined these to final size in our shop providing a slight interference between tapered surfaces. Quentin then lapped the first one for a precise fit.Our locomotive springs arrived on Wednesday. These were fabricated for us by a vendor in Canada. They were shipped as soon as we paid the tariff charges.Our locomotive spAs an aside, after our cold Maine winter in the shop, this week was unseasonably hot. The good news is we didn’t have to tend to the coal stove this session.
And the even hotter news is that YOU have raised $52,774.50 to keep us “Pushing Forward” with Build 11. Remember, every dollar (up to $60,000) will be MATCHED – so we are only $7200 shy of meeting our $120,000 goal for 2026.
