A dry morning allowed further progress on the finishing touches on wagon no. 146. Max Birchenough, Charles Benedetto and John Olsen worked on cutting off the excess threads on the door bolts before painting them with black Hammerite.
Max began by wire brushing the two chains that secure the lower door and then painting them with black Hammerite paint. Charles and John needed to perform some restoration work on one of our (ex wagon 134 frame) stands before it could be used as a painting stand, as some unkind soul had handled it very roughly and caused one timber to split and the diagonal bracing to come adrift.
While Charles finished replacing the fixings crews with heavier duty versions John used an angle grinder with metal cutting disc to shorten the overlong bolts on the individual doors. As each was completed the door was handed on to Max who masked around the metalwork and then painted the nuts and bolts and touched up the hinges.
Coffee was out on the platform in the sun with Mike Green before we returned to angle grinding and painting. Charles used the second angle grinder, with a wire brush head fitted, to clean the rust off two of the FR wagon axleboxes ready for priming.
With all three doors completed and additional nuts and bolts on the wagon painted black, no. 146 was sheeted over and left outside the Gunpowder Store so that John could work on it during the week and it could also be inspected to ensure it was mechanically safe to be run on the line.
Photos by John Olsen