Dwarf Eggs

Recently the wash room in the mess coach has had a bit of a makeover.   It had been noticed that abusers of the mess coach have an approach to removing hand cleanser that is reminiscent of what dogs do to dry themselves after getting wet, hand cleanser thereby being sprayed liberally all over the place.  To stop the paintwork from getting too scruffy, Mike Wathen has been engaged to install nice, easy to wipe clean tiles behind the wash basins and once that was done, neat dispensers of  hand cleanser have been attached to the walls above them.  We now have two different varieties of hand cleanser. On the wall on the right as you go in, is a variety that if I can use a Star Trek analogy, is of a type where phasers have not so much been set to "stun" as set to "give them a stern talking to".  On the wall on the left is a variety of hand cleanser where the phasers were set to "terminate with extreme prejudice".

"Stern talking to" hand cleanser

"Takes no prisoners" hand cleanser!

Having recently commenced on my own little engineering project (non-railway related.... I do have a life outside of the GWSR you know), I had need of obtaining some suitably potent hand cleanser myself.  I added it to the shopping list that I keep on my not so smart phone.  My phone thinks that it knows rather better than me and insists on trying to correct my spelling.  On this occasion, it decided to auto-correct the brand name of the hand cleansing product concerned to "Dwarf Eggs".   The intricacies of dwarf reproduction had hitherto eluded me, I had rashly assumed that it involved birds & bees, the birds probably being of the stork variety.  I can't imagine how shocked Snow White must have been, when she opened the fridge for the ingredients of an omelette, only to find that a baby dwarf had hatched out.

Anyway, I digress.  Saturday dawned once more and the biggest job taking place was the dismantling of Foremarke Hall.  As usual, a fair sized team of people was busying themselves extricating various assemblies.  The tough one was the superheater header.  It was bolted onto a shelf at the back of the smokebox and also to the tube plate.  The bolts to the shelf were easy enough to get at, the bolts attaching it to the tube plate though, were pretty much in a completely inaccessible spot behind the superheater header.  Attempts were made using conventional hand tools to undo the bolts, but they simply wouldn't budge.  No end of colourful Anglo Saxon expressions had any effect either. Eventually John fired up the oxy-acetylene gear and gave them some of the "terminate with extreme prejudice" treatment.  

John gives up on giving it a "stern talking to"

We ran out of oxygen at one point, Phil fetched some more:

Phil takes away the empties

Once the superheater header was freed of the bolts that were holding it captive and was just resting on the shelf, we then had to get it out of the smoke box.  This was no mean feat, it's a fairly sizable chunk of cast iron... you'd probably notice if you dropped it on your foot.  Somebody came up with the bright idea of partially reinserting a couple of the superheater elements and then levering it off of its shelf onto the elements.  After that it would just be a case of pushing it far enough to be able to get it onto the forks of our fork lift truck... simples!   Well, yes, getting the superheater elements in place was a piece of cake, what followed most definitely wasn't.

Levering it off of the shelf onto the superheater elements

Getting it off of the shelf and onto the elements was considered to be a success worthy of a tea break, it was now detached and had conspicuously failed to drop to the floor of the smoke box or crush anybody.  So far so good.

After a bit of a concerted pushing and pulling effort, we got the superheater header to the front of the smokebox, those who pushed needed to access the smoke box through the hole where the chimney used to be.

Sean going up the chimney.

There was one more problem though:

It was too wide to fit through the smoke box door

Much more colourful Anglo Saxon was employed, all to no avail.  Eventually we ended up suspending it from the roof of the smoke box, removing the superheater elements that it had been resting on, rotating it through 90 degrees and then getting the fork lift in to extricate it.

Success!

We were on a roll now. The next job was to start getting the tubes out:

John, gas-axes the superheater tubes in the smoke box

After a few of the large tubes had been cut in the smoke box, John went off to the firebox to cut them through at that end.  It was a case of wait in the smoke box for the other end to be cut, and when enough had been bashed through to get a purchase on with mole grips, pull the tubes out.

Using a scaffolding pole to align the tube with the tube plate so that it could be bashed through from the far end.

I was a bit surprised to discover that although Foremarke Hall's boiler had been emptied soon after she was taken out of traffic back in December, that the boiler still contained a fair amount of wet sludge, much of which seemed to cling to the tubes as they came out. 

After a few tubes were out... John at work in the firebox, as seen from the smoke box....

....and then the sparks flew again.

Once we'd got the top row of large tubes mostly out, we had a go at a few of the flue tubes as well:

More cutting in the smoke box.

Part way through, and before the light completely disappeared, I tried to arrange a shot of some of the merry band of people present along with the first few tubes that we'd removed, but they all ran away at the suggestion.  I sneakily grabbed one a little later when they weren't looking:

L-R, Neil, John, Steve & Will, with the first three tubes

And finally, I spotted this on the flickr photo sharing website a week or so ago and thought it would be quite nice to include it here.  Thank you very much to Sally Metcalfe, who kindly granted me the permission to reproduce it: