by eriemike
Building a live steamer can be a daunting task, but building 5 of them can be a real challenge. Four of us from the Northeast Live Steamers are doing just that. It is my first time machining anything and since we started in January of this year, I have learned a tremendous amount.
The member of the club who started this thought doing such a project would accomplish a lot of goals. It would allow someone who didn’t have a live steam locomotive and didn’t have the $$ to purchase one to get one. More importantly it would teach and pass on to another generation machining skills to those who either don’t have any or little experience. Now we will know what to do to maintain/repair or build other locomotives in the future and keep our hobby alive. We also wanted to inspire and excite the members of our club and hope that our adventure would inspire other groups to do similar projects.
One of the major obstacles was to find a machine shop that could support four or five people working at the same time. A friend of our club happened to have a very nice machine shop that would accommodate the four of us and he offered to let us use it on several conditions. First we would have to build him a locomotive and secondly the work sessions could not devolve into a bull session. If it did turn into an armchair meet, then he would boot us from his shop. We promised him that wouldn’t happen and that we would be more than happy to build a fifth locomotive. What was even better, the machine shop owner was happy to bring his 50 + years of machine shop skills to teach us and to help smoothly guide the project along.
The locomotive we are building is a Charlie Purinton design. He calls it “Frodo”, a character form the “Hobbit” books, and it is a ¾” scale 0-4-0. The reason this locomotive was chosen, was that it is comparatively easy to build for a newcomer and once built we know that it will run well. There are no castings with this project. Everything is being machined from scratch. Since January, we have completed all five tenders and 75 to 80% of the 5 locomotive chassis are done.
The way we split the tasks up is that one person would machine a part for all the locomtoives. For expamle one person would machine all 20 driving wheels. It took a long time, but the more you did the better you got and you didn't have to constantly reset the machine if everyone just worked on their own locomotive. We are predicting that the project could be completed by late spring early summer of 2009 as long as we don’t hit any major snafus.
Also we work every Monday night for 2 1/2 hours. So far everyone has pitched in $50 each to buy stock. The rest of the cost is a lot of blood, sweat and many tears. Mistakes have obviously been made when machining, but many lessons are being learned and we are all having a fantastic time doing this.
The member of the club who started this thought doing such a project would accomplish a lot of goals. It would allow someone who didn’t have a live steam locomotive and didn’t have the $$ to purchase one to get one. More importantly it would teach and pass on to another generation machining skills to those who either don’t have any or little experience. Now we will know what to do to maintain/repair or build other locomotives in the future and keep our hobby alive. We also wanted to inspire and excite the members of our club and hope that our adventure would inspire other groups to do similar projects.
One of the major obstacles was to find a machine shop that could support four or five people working at the same time. A friend of our club happened to have a very nice machine shop that would accommodate the four of us and he offered to let us use it on several conditions. First we would have to build him a locomotive and secondly the work sessions could not devolve into a bull session. If it did turn into an armchair meet, then he would boot us from his shop. We promised him that wouldn’t happen and that we would be more than happy to build a fifth locomotive. What was even better, the machine shop owner was happy to bring his 50 + years of machine shop skills to teach us and to help smoothly guide the project along.
The locomotive we are building is a Charlie Purinton design. He calls it “Frodo”, a character form the “Hobbit” books, and it is a ¾” scale 0-4-0. The reason this locomotive was chosen, was that it is comparatively easy to build for a newcomer and once built we know that it will run well. There are no castings with this project. Everything is being machined from scratch. Since January, we have completed all five tenders and 75 to 80% of the 5 locomotive chassis are done.
The way we split the tasks up is that one person would machine a part for all the locomtoives. For expamle one person would machine all 20 driving wheels. It took a long time, but the more you did the better you got and you didn't have to constantly reset the machine if everyone just worked on their own locomotive. We are predicting that the project could be completed by late spring early summer of 2009 as long as we don’t hit any major snafus.
Also we work every Monday night for 2 1/2 hours. So far everyone has pitched in $50 each to buy stock. The rest of the cost is a lot of blood, sweat and many tears. Mistakes have obviously been made when machining, but many lessons are being learned and we are all having a fantastic time doing this.
