The first part of the working weekend at Llangollen was centred round the Class 108 unit. The rest of the retrimmed seats have been fitted in Driving Motor Brake 51907, which smartens this unit up a great deal, while an 'FP' Exam has also been conducted on the unit. One seat base, which had split, also had to be welded up.
Restoration of Cravens 56456 continues, with painting of the ceiling supports continuing and a start being made on painting the new seat brackets. Trial fittings of timber to the vestibule partitions have also been carried out.
A start has been made on welding in the new corrugated floor supports inside the brake area of Gloucester Driving Motor Brake 51118. These are being fitted over the new 3mm steel floor and will eventually be covered with ply, rather than the original arrangement of using a bitumen type substance.
On the same vehicle the remaining few holes for the false rivets have been drilled and the rivets have been fitted. A start was then made on filling the allen key holes in the top of the rivets so that that when they are painted they will look exactly as original.
A final job at Pentrefelin has been applying undercoat on the new plywood panels for one of the stores VJX vans.
Over the weekend the Wickham was used to cover all the DMU diagrams at Llangollen's 1960s event, without any incidents and on Saturday ran from early in the morning to after midnight.
Most of the work this week has centred round changing the seats in Class 108 51907 for a set of re-trimmed ones.
A hire van was sent to pick up a set of refurbished seat cushions and backs on Saturday morning while at the same time a group of members were busy removing the old ones. While these were out the opportunity was taken to have a bit of a clean up and to get to areas that normally cannot be reached. The seats that have been removed have now been despatched for similar treatment. Some work has also been done to reset up the AWS test equipment on the depot.
Work has continued on inserting the false rivets into the Gloucester Power Car, with the remainder across the front done during the week and few extra on the front corner at the weekend. We have also put a temporary set of numbers on the coach as we are fed up of people asking what number it is! You will note that we have not yet decided which region it is allocated to.
The 141 painting advances with the cream coat now being applied to the south side of 55533. We have had to weld up quite a few splits in the bodywork lower panels before painting them but this job is now reaching towards its conclusion.
This week has seen another 36 false 'rivets' put into the Gloucester power car where the roof edge meets the rear.
Originally the roof was riveted to the side panels but in the rebuild we had to put a new edge on the roof. To replace the rivets we have used dome-head bolts each of which has to be painstakingly drilled out and then fitted and tightened by hand. Fortunately we are nearly at the end of this job as far as the power car is concerned, with just a few left to do over the cab.
Painting is now almost complete on the north side of the Class 141, leaving only one side of 55533 to paint to complete the job. The unit is beginning to look very smart indeed.
One issue we have had to sort out is the repair of some of the lower body panels which have begun to split. Particularly bad was the one under the secondman's window which had to be removed altogether so that a large piece could be welded in. This was then put back on the vehicle and first filled.
Over at Llangollen we ran the standard B service diagram, as well as a driver experience diagram.
Work has been ongoing at Llangollen this weekend to paint the ceiling joists inside Cravens Driving Trailer 56456 with about a third of them being completed.
Replacement panels for one of the large sliding doors of one of the VJX stores vans were also cut out and all four of them were painted with primer with two sides also receiving an undercoat.
At the Midland a pair of refurbished tail light assemblies have been fitted to Gloucester Driving Motor Brake 51118 and we also continued to work on fitting the replacement large rivets which are such a feature of the roof line of this type of vehicle. A total of 32 more of these were completed with many having to be drilled out from scratch.
The repainting of the Class 141 continues with both coaches on the 'North' side now having their red areas done. Both ends of the units have also now received a first coat of yellow.
It's been another busy week in the workshops with attention being turned to reducing the number of jobs that have been deferred due to a lack of time when servicing has been carried out.
After many false starts the AWS has finally been fixed on Class 108 51907. This would not cancel and the culprit was traced to be the relay box contacts. Also it was found that the 'line clear' bell would not work and so this was fixed as well. This job was repeated on trailer 54490 later in the day. This vehicle also had some work done on its secondman's door hinges, which had become loose - largely because the screws had not been secured properly in the doorframe. These were re-drilled and sorted out.
A faulty demister in Class 104 50454 was fixed by reattaching a wire to the switch. A length of ducting was fitted that has been missing for years (ever since we had the vehicle, we suspect) so that hot air from the L/H heater is sent to the cab, rather than just lost under the vehicle.
Some plywood panels for the doors of one of our stores vehicles, a VJX van, have been cut to shape and await fitting.
Meanwhile at Butterley some modifications were made to the recently-fitted corridor end on Gloucester Power Car 51118 to stop the rain coming in and some ceiling supports were removed from the cab to enable the fitting of yet more false rivets round the body edges. The north side of the 141 has been rubbed down ready for a repaint.
The Wickham was in service for the Llangollen Transport Extravaganza and was captured at Glyndyfrdwy.
