From what other information I found online about the late Victor Shattock, he had an Atlas 6" lathe and an Atlas bench drill press for his machine tools. There was a lengthy writeup (Golden Gate Live Steamers, I think it was) that I found about Mr. Shattock and his basement live steam railroad and his locomotives. No mention is made of his having started building the Hudson that Lester Bowman now owns.
The writeup I read went into a good deal of detail about Mr. Shattock and his role in GGLS. Mr. Shattock was born in England and married his wife, Maude while living in England. He was formally trained to be a plumber and worked at that trade in England. He and his wife emigrated initially to Canada, where Mr. Shattock opened a plumbing business. He felt there were more opportunities in California, so he and his wife emigrated to California. There, Mr. Shattock found employment with the Southern Pacific RR, doing plumbing and heating maintenance work on SP buildings and properties. Reading this, I found it remarkable that Mr. Shattock was never formally trained as a machinist, nor did he work in the motive power department of the SP. He did succeed in mastering machine shop practice and got a good working knowledge of steam locomotives. My guess is Mr. Shattock kept his eyes and ears open while working on SP's buildings doing plumbing and heating. He likely was able to ask questions of mechanical engineers as well as such crafts as machinists and boilermakers and pipefitters. He likely also got some informal training from SP machinists along the way as he did the plumbing and heating work in SP's buildings. I would think that Mr. Shattock also had access to the SP's engineering drawings on their locomotives and probably was able to get some prints made ( real blue prints back in those days and not so simple as photocopying).
Mr. Shattock, from what I read, was able to talk to SP brass to get materials and use of equipment for the Golden Gate Live Steamers first club grounds and running tracks. He wangled good used bridge timbers for the first raised track at GGLS. The fact he was a SP employee, and the fact he modelled SP's steam locomotives all worked into good publicity for the Southern Pacific RR. SP returned the favors to Mr. Shattock in the form of "surplus" materials and use of equipment for building the GGLS live steam track and club facilities.
One article I read online about Mr. Shattock was written by his grandson, Ken Shattock, from whom Lester Bowman's father bought the Hudson locomotive. Ken Shattock starts his article by saying he came from a broken home, and was taken in by his grandparents as a small boy. His grandparents raised him, and there are some photos of a young Ken Shattock with Victor Shattock and the smaller live steam locomotives on the basement layout. Remarkably, Mr. Shattock had time to be a good father and husband while cranking out quite a number of scale model live steam locomotives and building an incredible indoor layout in his home basement. During WWII, Mr. Shattock was investigated for possible subversive or espionage activity. It seemed by that point in time, people would flock to Mr. Shattock's home on certain weekday evenings to see his live steam layout running. He ran multiple trains and had working switches and a working turntable and water tower. During WWII, gatherings of fairly sizeable groups of people who were meeting in a private home with no advertised or apparent purpose on a regular basis attracted the attention of government agents. Two agents arrived one evening when Mr. Shattock had his locomotives in steam and blended in with the crowd. They afterwards interviewed Mr. Shattock privately, said they saw nothing suspicious or worse in what they'd seen. The agents then said they enjoyed seeing the live steam locomotives running and had developed enough of an interest to come back just to watch the live steam locomotives running.
From what I've read, Mr. Shattock was a low-key sort of man and quite the proper gentleman. Photos of him in his shop show him in a white shirt and necktie. I find Mr. Shattock to have been a remarkable man in so many ways. He learned what he needed to know to build live steam locomotives and it went beyond book learning and paper drawings- he learned the machine shop work and many other skills. He managed to build a number of very fine live steam locomotive models with limited tools and equipment. He did this in an era when Live Steam castings were not so common, and if a person wanted to build a model live steam locomotive, they had to often make their own patterns and get castings poured, and do a lot of the engineering and design to produce the working drawings before starting to build anything. This sort of hobby is bound to take considerable amounts of spare time, yet Mr. Shattock seems to have found some way to balance being a father and husband with his live steam hobby. Seeing not only the locomotives but the live steam indoor layout he had built has me wondering where and how he managed to balance his familial and husbandly duties with his hobby time and hold down a full time job. In one story, Mr. Shattock was working away from his home on some SP site, and had a RR car setup as a plumbing shop and with living accomodations. He succeeded in building a live steam locomotive and short test track in that SP shop car. The man must have had a continuously working mind with photographic detail and the ability to design and hold engineering details in his mind. In his shop, building those locomotives on nothing more than a 6" Atlas lathe and drill press, he must have worked with no wasted moves and made every second of time count. Using a lathe milling attachment is a limited and slow alternative to a milling machine, and that is all Mr. Shattock had to work with. At so many levels, Mr. Shattock had to have been a very remarkable man. As Lester Bowman notes, and from my reading about Mr. Shattock (prompted by Lester Bowman's original post), seeing the steel boiler of the Hudson does raise the possibility some SP boilermaker(s) may have built it for Mr. Shattock. Having equipment to cut and roll up the barrel, firebox, firebox wrapper and flange the required sheets and all the rest of the boiler parts took a boiler shop. Seeing the welding as it was done on that boiler tells me an experienced O/A welder did the work.
While Mr. Shattock had no shortage of skills and determination, I would think it was a stretch for him to have made that steel boiler. As they say, dead men tell no tales, so we can only guess at who and how the steel boiler was made.
Regarding the staybolts on the boiler: the boiler is put together with screwed stays. These are rigid stays. How they had a small staybolt tap to put in those rigid screwed stays is a nice question in itself. The way a screwed rigid stay would be finished up is to have "hammered it up", meaning peened the exposed ends sticking out of the boiler sheets. Once the ends were "hammered up", in the old days, the boiler makers would run a calking chisel around the riveted over ends of each stay. By the '30's, seal welding of rigid stays was being done instead of the calking. The stays that tie the crownsheet (the top of the firebox) to the roof sheet on the outer wrapper would have been flexible stays on the full sized boilers. These would have had a ball-and-socket joint where the staybolt seated on the firebox roof sheet. The ball-and-socket joints would have had screwed caps on them to make them steam tight. On the model boiler, since no flexible stays are used on the firebox roof sheet, chances are Mr. Shattock, et al, was going to make some "dummy" caps to create the look of flexible stays. These would be nothing more than a cap nut with maybe a copper gasket to seal it against the boiler's roof sheet. Inside the firebox, on the crownsheet, the stays would likely have been seal welded when they finished the Hudson's boiler, but it would have been a bit of a feat to get in there to O/A seal weld those stays. They may have planned to simply rivet over the ends of the stays sticking thru the crownsheet with some kind of rivet snap.
Looking at the backhead, there are raised pads for the tappings for the water level glass and try cocks. What this tells me is that someone possibly built up those pads with oxyacetylene welding and then slicked them off flat. This is really good practice as it provides what is known as "compensation" for the tapped holes in the backhead. Someone was thinking in terms of full size boiler practice. There are hinge pieces already welded to the backhead for the firedoor, so whomever was doing the welding was skillful enough to do some very small and fine work with it. Typically, when I think of railroad shops and boiler work, it is heavy work. To do the kind of welding needed on the Hudson boiler, it took a torch with finer tips, and possibly an "aircraft" torch. An "aircraft" oxyacetylene torch is an extremely small torch with very fine tips. The valves for controlling oxygen and acetylene are set forward on the torch barrel so the welder can manipulate them to adjust the flame while welding.
I would not be surprised if Mr. Shattock and the boiler shop foreman were buddies, and the result was things needed to build the Hudson's boiler were purchased by the SP boiler shop. A special order small staybolt tap, and a small diameter tube roller and an aircraft torch all would be the kinds of tools that would be purchased for the job. Back in the days when that Hudson boiler was being built, manufacturers of things like staybolt taps existed and would take a special order, as would makers of tube rollers. Aircraft torches were in common use by the 'twenties and 'thirties for what the name says: welding tubular aircraft frames together. Other crafts also make use of aircraft torches and they are still in production.
The other job to consider with building any rod-connected steam locomotive is the "quartering" of the axles and wheels. The keyways on the axles are indexed at some angle to each other so that the cranks are at something like 90 degrees from left-to-right side of the engine. This prevents a locomotive getting stuck on dead center.
When a locomotive is built, the keyways in the axles are indexed to whatever angle is required from left-to-right side (or as railroads tended to say: engineer's side and fireman's side on steam locomotives). The drive wheel hubs also have to have their keyways indexed, and the crankpins have to maintain this same indexing. It is done on full sized locomotives with a purpose built machine tool called a "quartering machine" which can either bore the crankpin holes in the drive wheel hubs, or can take a cut on the crankpins to bring them into correct quartering (done when an engine is shopped for heavy repairs). How Mr. Shattock pulled off the quartering with very simple and limited machine tools and tooling says a lot about the man. One old motion picture (now a youtube) shows him using his bench vise as his "wheel press". Cutting keyways in the axles on the lathe milling attachment is do-able, slow but possible. The indexing of the axles to establish the quartering would require a special fixture. Cutting keyways in the drive wheel hubs would likely have taken a "government job" with a broach and press, or else meant endless hours "shaping" the
keyways in the driver hubs with a boring bar and toolbit in the lathe. Doing this for one model live steam locomotive would have taken most people quite some time, and one locomotive model would have been their total output with the shop facilities Mr. Shattock had. Pondering the work needed to build a model live steam locomotive (based on experience with full size steam locomotive work), I find more and more areas of the work to marvel at.