Ottawa Electric Railway 696: Shop ready to roll, at last.

In September of 2012 our new work season started. These formal work sessions run on Wednesday nights from September through June. We also worked the odd Saturday in order to finish special projects or participate in Open Doors or local train shows.

Peter and I working the 696 booth at Ottawa's Open Doors weekend. We are at the new OC Transpo Industrial Avenue garage.

Teddy Dong also worked the show on Open Doors weekend.

Always lots of fun at Open Doors Ottawa both for the public and the volunteers. Industrial Avenue Garage had new buses on display as well as a toy bus...

...but the old buses were everyone's favourite!

The followers of this blog would have noticed that I hadn't posted anything for a long while, the principle reason was that there was no progress to report. From the time the news that we had move to the time work on the car restated was about a year. I myself still had to wait before I could begin where I left off. I kept busy doing other jobs like completing the brake cylinder, handbrake and slack-adjuster. Still I had to find other work because I could not mount my finished products on the car as the floor needed to be installed.

We break it and Rhéaume fixes it or gets a replacement. He also get all the supplies for the group and sometimes he even gets to do some of his own work!

Georg milling the side of a journal box for the truck he is rebuilding. I'm working on the lathe turning a new part for the handbrake.

The new pin for the handbrake that I'm re-assembling.

The handbrake almost ready to be assembled. At this point in time I still had to turn a new pin to hold the spool pictured to the left of the stand. The thicker bar stock on the right will be used to make the new pin.

We decided we should complete the leftover hot riveting, first do the rivets at the four end corners, then replace the loose rivets or the poorly hammered ones which I am happy to report, were very few.
This would have to be done before the interior walls, floor and end platform could be started.

The amount of riveting to do was relatively little and that we had now become "experts" (ha-ha) we just used our set of torches with our portable forge. Although it uses lots of acetylene it works quite well for small jobs.