Keeping 26043 alive.....No more welding....well on the outside anyway..
Entry posted by pheaton in preservation
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Work continues at pace since the last blog, mostly taking advantage of the good weather to carry on with the body work before the winter comes and its difficult to do anything externally in the wind and rain.
All of the major welding has now been completed, we can see the cant rail area has had new steel put in place, the entire lower half of no 2 end has now been ground back and filled and a base primer applied (several more coats of primer are due yet.
Extensive corrosion was found above the door, and this has also been cut out, this has all since been re-plated, the engine room door will be "modified" to prevent a re-occurrence of this , as water tends to run down the bodyside and pool on the top of the door.
B Side radiator frame, corrosion had comepletely pulled the skill away from the frame causing a large ripple, this two has now been completely replated.
The window frame steel itself in the door was found to be de-laminating which would have meant it would have been impossible to re-seal the window, this too has now been repaired
More views of repaired steelwork below the vents for the boiler room control resistors
And here you can see the aluminium strip applied to seal the bodywork against the weather, the reason for using aluminium is the cant rail grills and surrounding structure is aluminium, and replacing with steel would corrode the aluminium quite quickly, the aluminium is riveted with over 400 rivets, and also sealed with a NON setting sealant, which will keep the whole thing water tight, this is where the water ingress started which caused all of the corrosion seen in one of my previous blogs, a profiled finishing strip will hide the join between the aluminium and the steel, and the rivet heads will be ground flush and filled. Its very easy to fix corrosion, but its better to stop it happening again 
The bodyside windows have now started to be re-installed, however a shortage of the correct profile seal has stalled this, a lot of people dont realise its the simple things that can trip you up, originally this seal was £3.10 a meter and readily availiable, the distributor decided it was obsolete 5 years ago (despite it being one of the most common rail profiles) and now charges £15.45 a meter with a minimum run of 120m!
One of the perils of putting a bit too much pressure on the glass when re-installing it :)
The hole at the front has also had new steel applied.
Elsewhere work has returned to the roof, where the grills have al l been cleaned out unblocked, and had new threads to retain the grills installed
The fibreglass domes have also been sanded back and any damage to the gel coat repaired, more work is required on top though.
A view of the locomotive roof with the engine room cover removed.
Work has also been taking place above the radiators, the, holes that retain the fibreglass covers drilled and re-tapped to a metric size, you can see BCRW were not to good when it came to drilling straight holes!
The fibreglass covers being repaired and re-painted, they will have there holes re-drilled, this is an undercoat they will be rubbed again down and have top coat applied later.
Another major area of work is the fibreglass roof cover itself, which after 60 years is in a pretty poor state it was split, had many botched repairs and was falling apart.
Re-enforcement of a corner of the section that had snapped completely
Some examples of damage to the roof, from big holes to splits and a complete section that was snapped off
A new aluminium section being trial fitted, also many "friday afternoon" repairs are evident as is splitting and cracking in the frame.
The roof had split 3 of its 4 bearers, as the roof was originally created in a mould you cant replace these very easily and retain any strength, as a result strengthening plates have been fitted and riveted with special fibreglass rivets over the crack.
The newly formed aluminium section awaiting and riveting into place
A corner was also missing after a hard life this was also repaired
The roof had cracked entirely across this section (due to the missing section that was repaired with aluminium) now that its back in place a patch and be applied with out the roof re-fracturing.
FInally a complete new top skin was applied after the old one has been "peeled" off as can be seen one of the lifting lugs is missing, this one done by a passing tree when 043 has been on lorry on its many travels...
A new lug made and awaits sealing.
Edited by pheaton
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