In the past few months, I was retained to do the engineering for the repairs on Arcade & Attica RR's locomotive number 18's boiler. 15 years earlier, I had run a set of boiler calculations and filed the Form 4 (boiler registration document) and Form 19's (boiler alteration and repair documents) with the US Federal RR Administration (FRA).
When the tubes reached the end of their allowable time (based on days of service, meaning whenever there is a fire in the boiler), the locomotive came up for inspection and tube replacement. I got a call from the A & A RR to come up and take a look at the firebox. The FRA had inspected the firebox and due to the amount of repairs and repairs-on-repairs consisting of patching, pad welding, and new cracks in some of the firebox sheets, FRA had condemned the firebox in its entirety. My inspection confirmed this. I recommended Mack Brothers Boiler Works to handle the repairs and making of a new firebox. I went up to the A & A RR in February and Jimmy Hueber, the owner of Mack Brother, met with us at the A & A RR's engine house. We had had a conference call with FRA previously, and I had suggested using welded construction for a firebox replacement, something I had done on Steamtown's number 26. With a "keyhole" shaped firebox, using welded construction allows the firebox to be "built" inside the "wrapper" of the boiler. In the days of riveted construction, replacing this style firebox would have meant at least taking the backhead off the boiler. FRA was fine with welded construction for the new firebox but wanted the sheets (any plate steel part going into a firetube boiler is referred to as a "sheet", even if formed into curved sections) to be flanged rather than simply making the corners with welded seams.
We put a tentative plan together with Mack Brothers: the boiler on Locomotive 18 will be transported to Syracuse on a low-boy, and Mack Brother shop will work on it there. Mack Brothers no longer flanges boiler sheets, so that part of the job will be subbed out. Mack Brothers also knows that it no longer pays to layout and trepan or drill holes in a tube sheet, so gives that out to CNC waterjet cutting shops.
This past Wednesday, my buddy and I drove up to Mack Brothers for a meeting with A & A RR's people to discuss the job. It was my first visit to Mack Brothers' shop. Jimmy Hueber gave us quite the tour. It is a working time capsule that kept with the times. Modern welding equipment is in use, including MIG and TIG, surrounded by the original boiler shop. The office is a modest frame house that one of the shop's founders had lived in back in the 1800's. The office walls are hung with framed working drawings done by the founders of the shop in India Ink. We saw quite a similarity between their drawings and my own engineering drawings. Boilers of all sorts of designs were on those drawings, and Jimmy Hueber said they have plenty more in the "flat files", all traced on linen in India Ink. The shop itself held machinery I had only seen here on this 'board or in old books. A post-mounted radial drill, with the drill head on a kind of jib swung off a column in the shop, driven by open gearing from lineshafting. The old lineshafting and its motor are all operational. That post-mounted radial drill was used to drill holes in boiler sheets and could reach across a complete boiler sheet to reach holes for rivets or staybolts. Jimmy Hueber fired up the "new" shop air compressor- a big one cylinder reciprocating Chicago-Pneumatic compressor installed in 1943 since the shop was doing defense work at the time. The compressor discharged into a large riveted vertical air receiver which Jimmy said his grandfather had designed and built. he pointed out a "mistake" on the receiver: his grandfather had made both barrel courses the same diameter, instead of one telescoping into the other. To solve this problem, the end of one course had been swedged down in outer diameter to slip into the other . It meant "scarfing the sheets" on the long seam of the course which was being swedged down. It was a neat piece of boilermaking in its own right. When air pressure was up, Jimmy Hueber ran the plate rolls for us- the compressed air being needed to run the steam engine that drives the rolls. The rolls have the Mack Brothers name cast into the roll stands, and the engine is a "twin" cylinder (no compounding) with Stephenson's link motion. Jimmy Hueber had the rolls running full ahead and without shutting off air, moved the reverse lever to the other end of the quadrant, putting the rolls into "emergency astern". He said those rolls have handled up to 3" thick plate.
The shop was a time capsule, but a working one. Jimmy's nephew, a man in maybe his '30's is active in the business, which is a good thing- seeing younger people carrying it on.
We figured out how the job will be done, and Mack Brothers will be doing the work. The flanging will be subbed out, and the furnishing of the flexible staybolts will be subbed out. Jimmy showed us the toolroom- off the office. It is a storehouse of everything a boilermaker working on riveted firetube boilers could ever need. I saw staybolt taps, and I saw the tapered-thread "boiler taps" for putting in studbolts into the sheets of a boiler. There were riveting guns and rivet snaps and rivet busters stacked on a shelf like cordwood. More stacks of tube rollers, and what the old boilermakers called "banjo's" (gear drives to run a tube roller inside a tight place like in a mud drum or similar). Jimmy Hueber is a rare man in this day and age, and he takes a genuine pride and interest in carrying on his family's heritage in boiler work. Like me, he does not use CAD, and like me, has a drawing table with a "drafting machine" on it. We joked about the trials and tribulations we went through as youngsters learning to trace a drawing in ink and getting the fatal ink blotch when the ruling pen caught on the thread of the linen tracing cloth.
I had my boiler calculations with me for the Arcade and Attica Boiler, and those calculations run about 100 pages, all done longhand. We went over them, as we needed to know developed stresses and loadings for staybolts and similar. I know Jimmy Hueber got a kick out of seeing the calculations and remarked when we were on "page 68" about the sheer volume of calculations needed to figure the minimum required thicknesses and maximum allowable working pressure in a Locomotive Boiler. It was a great visit, and I am glad to be able to send a job to the Mack Brothers Boiler and Sheet Iron Works.
Syracuse, NY, like so many other cities, was once a thriving manufacturing town. Within line of sight of Mack Brothers is the former Dietz lantern factory. Dietz is history, but the building was repainted with the old lettering with the Dietz logo and name. Dietz lanterns were once found all over, on farms, jobsites, and railroads. They were exported all over the world. Jimmy Hueber said they used to maintain the boilers in the old Dietz plant when it was up and running, but like so much of the industry in Syracuse, is long gone. Mack Brothers is a holdout, and moved with the times and survives, blending old with the new.
I call myself a stubborn dinosaur, and stepping into Jimmy Hueber's office and then the shop, I felt like I was coming to a place I belonged and knew.