Great idea - the split nut to hold the oddly shaped piece. Things like that are the reason I watch your, and others' videos. Learning new ( to me, at least ) ways to solve problems. Thanks for sharing.
Re-purposing that valve stem demonstrates why that sort of piece should never be tossed out in the scrap pile. You never know when an old bent corroded brass valve stem will be exactly what is needed to complete a repair. That saved you a lot of time and effort and it seemed to make a very good repair. The proof is in the pudding. We will know if the locomotive stops or not when they twist the valve. Thanks for posting. Take care.
Even if it isn't in condition for turning down to something smaller, if you have a furnace capable of melting it down you can use it to make a cast blank, along with the reserved chips and other bits not fit to use as they are. I started hanging on to valve bodies that had split due to freezing, and even old bushings, regardless of condition, for that purpose.
I have a set of brass drifts or punches I made out of old brass gate valve stems, one was made of a brass stem almost exactly like the salvaged one Keith used. Re-purposing old worn out parts is always a good idea!
I have rebuilt one of them, only did a grinding to the base and valve but the stem had the same but a sod broke the tap off it so I sleeved it and then added a new top for the tap, it was never going to handle hard turning so I made a top plate to stop the tap in its position, it worked and is still working after 10 years. But after fixing the one I made a new now out of steal. The train I was working on was 18" gauge. But anyway Keith you did a great job, keep it up.
Man and his tools....i liked the coloar you made to chuck the item..,simple but super effective. I have 5 thumbs to each hand but is hooked to your channel!
Thanks for sharing Keith. Enjoyed the video. May be another 100 years be it needs repair again. Thanks for all you the and other volunteers do at the museum. Love machinery and the genius of the design and function of that which is considered obsolete.
Keith For a machinist it was and easy task I felt great satisfaction for you just watching you do the repair. Always enjoy your videos especially the repairs. Mike
Wet, dirty, air being used in train brake systems. How the various complex A/B valves and the like continue to operate with acceptable reliability on a string of 110 cars of crude oil baffles me. Now, Keith, you tell me there were steam powered valves and cylinders used on the engine and (sometimes) tender!!. Who knew...steam brakes!! (As an emergency tie down) I had to do a little research on that topic! Didn't find much. How did they deal with corrosion and condensate in that line, what a nightmare to maintain! Always blowing it down etc. Thanks for revealing new things to learn about!
Most steam locomotives had a separate steam break just for the locomotive. In the case of our train, the jam brakes on the locomotive are the only brakes that we have - no air brakes on the two cars that we pull. This was common on small "industrial engines" like this one.
Thanks for another great video. I don't have any steam locomotives in my back yard but these are some excellent principles that can apply to repair many other things. I always learn something from your videos and thank you thank you for not playing any nasty distracting music in your videos.
Glad to see you working on something besides your lathes. Don't get mad at me. I love when you do a video like this but have a hard time on lathe restoration. Great video no doubt. You are just a natural in front of the camera some folks can do it some can't.
I've just noticed I've been missing some of your videos because you have a red band near the bottom of the thumbnail. Makes it look like I've already watched it when it's there in my subscriptions list. And I don't want to miss your videos!
keith seems to have abandoned comments altogether, it was nice when keith used to respond, heck keith once prided himself on reading and replying to them all, obviously that becomes an impossible target, but total abandonment is not cool
Lots of good content in this video; from repair planning to cutting and holding parts and also the editing was great to move the video along at the perfect rate
I want a job like his. I love fixing old stuff and making it work again. Makes my wife mad because that prevents her from just going out and buying a new one. Too much stuff is built for obsolescence today.
Looking forward to the time when you have your mini foundry set up and are able to cast the valve stem using the original as a pattern. A little rapping of the original would give you the extra gap to compensate for the shrinkage and you would have had a solid casting to machine. Really enjoyed your solution to this problem though. Keep up the good work!
This is what you do when you can't buy replacement parts for a 100 year old machine. A day in the life of an experienced machinist. Loved the video, very nice job. Thanks.
Keath, how much material was removed during the surface grind? I didn't see any reference to the original height, or why the original hight required brazing. Why did you sleeve it if you were planning on making a new pin. Why didn't you not make a hardened sleeve? It's not good practice to have soft on soft. This is why you're replacing in the first place. You could've pressed in a nice tool steel sleeve and Jig ground it?
If that valve stem end didn't have a machined surface to use your split ring clamp on, another way occurred to me. You could turn a cup that would accept the odd shape, then place it in the milling vice and center it under the spindle. Then hold the valve stem in the spindle and lower it into the cup. Then pour lead in the cup to lock the two pieces together. The outside diameter if the cup can now be held in the lathe. I've seen this done in the manufacturing of turbine blades when they need to hold the blade by it's complicated contoured surface to machine the tree (the part that keys into the turbine wheel).
Keith how confident are you that the new metal deposits will not come loose in time with erosion and potentially jam the valve? Could you not have ground and lapped the cast face back to a good surface and then made a very slightly longer shaft to compensate. That might prove to be more reliable and a much simpler solution.
Not trying to second guess your repair but will the steam heat expand the valve to the extent that bushing will loosen? Hopefully they will heat up and expand at the same rate. Good off the cuff repair. Think I would have ground that surface to "clean up" but that is just me. Again good repair.
Is the steam brake valve ever used in "lap" position, where the is "closed", trapping steam in the brake cylinder, or is it always used either in full "on" or "exhaust"?
Very interesting and great to see the renovation of old parts .Was there any particular reason why you chose 3/8" for the step down diameter as there looked to be plenty of meat left on the old part to have gone a little larger 7/16" or 1/2" making the shaft stronger where it was drilled and pinned, fully understand that there is no real force needed to turn the selector disk . Have I just answered my own question ?. Hope that sometime in the future it can be seen and demonstrated working on the engine.
I was surprised that you didn't silver solder the new stem as the 3/8" spigot with a roll pin is a bit skinny compared to stength of the original and you wouldn't want a failure point right there in a train breaking system.
As the whole valve body seems to be filled with steam when in use, I'm wondering - won't that steam try to push the pressed-in brass bushing out? Is the pressure / ring surface perhaps to low to win against the press fit friction...?
Another great video, Keith. Just a query though - if the shaft was an interference fit in the 3/8" blind hole, shouldn't you have drilled a small hole to let the air in the hole escape when pressing the shaft in? Otherwise, you are trying to super-compress the air in the blind hole.
Keith, Now I know why the Museum is/was closed every August. I simply forgot that when we tried to stop to see the Museum on 26 Aug on the way home from a week's vacation in N.C. (yes, we happened to rent the same cabin we rented 12 years ago and it was almost _exactly_ under the center line of the 100% solar eclipse!). However, I guess that visitors can't see your maintenance area anyway, so I probably wouldn't have had a chance to finally shake your hand. The lady running the store at the front gate knew who you were simply by mentioning that one of the volunteers made UA-cam videos of the work done out there -- I bet lots of visitors want to meet you out there on the weekends when you might be there. Please keep on making videos of Museum-related repairs like this one when you can. Of course, the repair and other machining videos you make that are not Museum-related are great information too!
Could you have cut the ports bigger, put in two sleeves that would have taken the pitting out, then surfaced the top like you did, that would also help stop the pitting on the cast iron near the holes?
Im curious as to why at the 26:39 mark where you put the collar on the stem to cut off the brass end, why couldn’t you clamp the brass end of the stem into the jaws and cut off the good part from the brass end of the stem?
Great video as always. One question. You are not afraid that the pin hole will weaken the pressed-in section of the shaft, so that it could break if the handle is torqued to hard?
Yes, it will surely weaken the shaft compared to the original straight from the factory valve. I personally might have brazed the rod on, or at the very least used a smaller spring pin, but I think the repair ought to work for a good long while in any case. It may in fact last decades.
Possibly, but then again there doesn't seem to be any force directly opposing any turning action (other than friction) so I wouldn't expect anyone to try to rip the shaft off...
Ahhh, but this is not just a simple valve it's a BRAKE valve and in an emergency the force applied to the handle may be extreme. Don't forget the end of the original stem was deformed (it may have also been brazed) and the handle attached to the stem was at one point broken and brazed back together. There is the matter of the steam causing resistance, but I think that may be secondary to an emergency brake application with force.
You can find graphite impregnated packing material quite a few places... Any number of ebay sellers have it cheap. OR you can type Graphite Packing into google and find hundreds of suppliers.
I actually agree with this concern - the saving grace might be that where this spring pin is located isn't really a flow path for the steam so the corrosion it would see would likely be minimal. A solid pin or tapered pin would have likely been a superior choice as they can handle more sheer force as well from the torque from the operator actuating the valve (seeing as how the shaft had been bent previously).
I agree - a stainless pin might be a better choice due to risk of corrosion from the steam, plus the fact that the brake valve is a safety-critical component.
That "maintenance" should have been done when you were originally restoring the engine, long before it went on track again. Instead of pinning, how about threading into the valve key, You can then pin it as well. The job turns out well but there are latent - "This will do" in there that are waiting to fail,
Great idea - the split nut to hold the oddly shaped piece. Things like that are the reason I watch your, and others' videos. Learning new ( to me, at least ) ways to solve problems. Thanks for sharing.
Re-purposing that valve stem demonstrates why that sort of piece should never be tossed out in the scrap pile. You never know when an old bent corroded brass valve stem will be exactly what is needed to complete a repair. That saved you a lot of time and effort and it seemed to make a very good repair. The proof is in the pudding. We will know if the locomotive stops or not when they twist the valve. Thanks for posting. Take care.
Even if it isn't in condition for turning down to something smaller, if you have a furnace capable of melting it down you can use it to make a cast blank, along with the reserved chips and other bits not fit to use as they are. I started hanging on to valve bodies that had split due to freezing, and even old bushings, regardless of condition, for that purpose.
I have a set of brass drifts or punches I made out of old brass gate valve stems, one was made of a brass stem almost exactly like the salvaged one Keith used. Re-purposing old worn out parts is always a good idea!
I have rebuilt one of them, only did a grinding to the base and valve but the stem had the same but a sod broke the tap off it so I sleeved it and then added a new top for the tap, it was never going to handle hard turning so I made a top plate to stop the tap in its position, it worked and is still working after 10 years.
But after fixing the one I made a new now out of steal.
The train I was working on was 18" gauge.
But anyway Keith you did a great job, keep it up.
Love the clamp to hold the spindle.
I learn something new with every one of your videos.
Peter Fletcher yes...that is sweet.
Keith, you really have an artist's touch with metal.
Ill probably never rebuild a steam valve but I probably will employ the techniques you demonstrated. Thank you for the education.
Man and his tools....i liked the coloar you made to chuck the item..,simple but super effective. I have 5 thumbs to each hand but is hooked to your channel!
Brilliant job Kieth. It was a pleasure to watch
Thanks for sharing Keith. Enjoyed the video. May be another 100 years be it needs repair again. Thanks for all you the and other volunteers do at the museum. Love machinery and the genius of the design and function of that which is considered obsolete.
Well done Keith.
Keith For a machinist it was and easy task I felt great satisfaction for you just watching you do the repair. Always enjoy your videos especially the repairs.
Mike
Innovative clamp. I never would've thought of that.
Thanks Keith. Good discussion on what you needed to do and why you could use a rule when it wasn't critical.
Wet, dirty, air being used in train brake systems. How the various complex A/B valves and the like continue to operate with acceptable reliability on a string of 110 cars of crude oil baffles me.
Now, Keith, you tell me there were steam powered valves and cylinders used on the engine and (sometimes) tender!!. Who knew...steam brakes!! (As an emergency tie down)
I had to do a little research on that topic! Didn't find much. How did they deal with corrosion and condensate in that line, what a nightmare to maintain! Always blowing it down etc.
Thanks for revealing new things to learn about!
Most steam locomotives had a separate steam break just for the locomotive. In the case of our train, the jam brakes on the locomotive are the only brakes that we have - no air brakes on the two cars that we pull. This was common on small "industrial engines" like this one.
You rebuild those valves every hundred years whether they need it or not. :)
I wish ANYTHING I had was that durable and reliable.
Thanks for another great video. I don't have any steam locomotives in my back yard but these are some excellent principles that can apply to repair many other things. I always learn something from your videos and thank you thank you for not playing any nasty distracting music in your videos.
Excellent work on this one. That should give it quite a few decades of work easily.
Looks good Keith, very nice work.
brilliant Keith such patience
Glad to see you working on something besides your lathes. Don't get mad at me. I love when you do a video like this but have a hard time on lathe restoration. Great video no doubt. You are just a natural in front of the camera some folks can do it some can't.
Nice repair Keith, a bundle of tips & tricks in that one 👍🏼
Perfect work Keith ! Thumbs up man ..
I was scratching my bald head wondering how in the hell. Must admit your clamp did not occurr to me, well done and best of all, simple!
100% pure pleasure!
Thanks for sharing Keith
Eyal Rechnitz i
Thanks for generously sharing your work on this valve project. Steam is somewhat like sea water: It eventually debrides(?) any/every(thing)......
You have no idea on how much you just helped me with the 1914 h.k.porter 0-4-0t tank engine my chapter has it has that very same valve :)
Good for another century. Brilliant.
Good save Keith
Excellent job.
I've just noticed I've been missing some of your videos because you have a red band near the bottom of the thumbnail. Makes it look like I've already watched it when it's there in my subscriptions list. And I don't want to miss your videos!
It also makes it hard to browse the older videos, for the same reason.
cooperised Has been mentioned 100's of times, but it seems Keith refuse to listen to constructive criticism.
complain to youtube to change their banner system
keith seems to have abandoned comments altogether, it was nice when keith used to respond, heck keith once prided himself on reading and replying to them all, obviously that becomes an impossible target, but total abandonment is not cool
It really isn't hard to keep up to date with his videos guys - talk about first world problems...
Locomotive repair videos are my favorite videos!
Brilliant repair. As usual.
Lots of good content in this video; from repair planning to cutting and holding parts and also the editing was great to move the video along at the perfect rate
Nice work.
Nice job on the repair Keith. Enjoyed the video!
Very cool stuff.
Thanks Keith, I enjoyed watching.
I did enjoy that Keith. Always interesting to see how tings were done.
very nice repair kieth on the valve i found it quite interesting another good job well done.
Great job. I always like the way you approach these unique setups.
Great work Keith as always very interesting to watch you work your magic
I want a job like his. I love fixing old stuff and making it work again. Makes my wife mad because that prevents her from just going out and buying a new one.
Too much stuff is built for obsolescence today.
Very good work !!!
Good project Keith, enjoyed this content.
Good video Keith thanks
Whoo! loving the locomotive stuff in the last video and this one!
Very interesting repair thanks for sharing.
Nice repair
Nice job. Very enjoyable.
Looking forward to the time when you have your mini foundry set up and are able to cast the valve stem using the original as a pattern. A little rapping of the original would give you the extra gap to compensate for the shrinkage and you would have had a solid casting to machine. Really enjoyed your solution to this problem though. Keep up the good work!
Very interesting show Keith, Thank you!
I really enjoy your videos. Thank you for another great one
Awesome repair!!!!
Can a brass part be built up with brazing? How does a casting compatibility go with bronze, copper, zinc or other alloys?
No chance of the steam pressure trying to press that shaft bushing out of the housing? I really enjoyed seeing the repair work. :-)
This is what you do when you can't buy replacement parts for a 100 year old machine. A day in the life of an experienced machinist. Loved the video, very nice job. Thanks.
Good afternoon from St John Parish, Louisiana 14 Dec 20.
nice!!! A Big reponsility! Good job.
Keath, how much material was removed during the surface grind? I didn't see any reference to the original height, or why the original hight required brazing. Why did you sleeve it if you were planning on making a new pin. Why didn't you not make a hardened sleeve?
It's not good practice to have soft on soft. This is why you're replacing in the first place. You could've pressed in a nice tool steel sleeve and Jig ground it?
Howdy Keith, another great video...
Hi Keith just wondering why you do not silver solder the brass shaft in.
If that valve stem end didn't have a machined surface to use your split ring clamp on, another way occurred to me. You could turn a cup that would accept the odd shape, then place it in the milling vice and center it under the spindle. Then hold the valve stem in the spindle and lower it into the cup. Then pour lead in the cup to lock the two pieces together. The outside diameter if the cup can now be held in the lathe.
I've seen this done in the manufacturing of turbine blades when they need to hold the blade by it's complicated contoured surface to machine the tree (the part that keys into the turbine wheel).
Ready for the next 100 years 😀
Is the jam valve controlling the main breaks or some sort of secondary brake?
you are my hero. saving machines one at a time. well maybe a few at a time. how much room left in the shop?
Keith how confident are you that the new metal deposits will not come loose in time with erosion and potentially jam the valve? Could you not have ground and lapped the cast face back to a good surface and then made a very slightly longer shaft to compensate. That might prove to be more reliable and a much simpler solution.
fantastic video - thank you!
Not trying to second guess your repair but will the steam heat expand the valve to the extent that bushing will loosen? Hopefully they will heat up and expand at the same rate. Good off the cuff repair. Think I would have ground that surface to "clean up" but that is just me. Again good repair.
another great video
Is the steam brake valve ever used in "lap" position, where the is "closed", trapping steam in the brake cylinder, or is it always used either in full "on" or "exhaust"?
Love these restorations. Always glad to see an old piece of machinery brought back to good working condition.
Very interesting and great to see the renovation of old parts .Was there any particular reason why you chose 3/8" for the step down diameter as there looked to be plenty of meat left on the old part to have gone a little larger 7/16" or 1/2" making the shaft stronger where it was drilled and pinned, fully understand that there is no real force needed to turn the selector disk . Have I just answered my own question ?.
Hope that sometime in the future it can be seen and demonstrated working on the engine.
I thought the same as some people are very heavy handed.
I was surprised that you didn't silver solder the new stem as the 3/8" spigot with a roll pin is a bit skinny compared to stength of the original and you wouldn't want a failure point right there in a train breaking system.
As the whole valve body seems to be filled with steam when in use, I'm wondering - won't that steam try to push the pressed-in brass bushing out? Is the pressure / ring surface perhaps to low to win against the press fit friction...?
Another great video, Keith. Just a query though - if the shaft was an interference fit in the 3/8" blind hole, shouldn't you have drilled a small hole to let the air in the hole escape when pressing the shaft in? Otherwise, you are trying to super-compress the air in the blind hole.
Keith, Now I know why the Museum is/was closed every August. I simply forgot that when we tried to stop to see the Museum on 26 Aug on the way home from a week's vacation in N.C. (yes, we happened to rent the same cabin we rented 12 years ago and it was almost _exactly_ under the center line of the 100% solar eclipse!). However, I guess that visitors can't see your maintenance area anyway, so I probably wouldn't have had a chance to finally shake your hand. The lady running the store at the front gate knew who you were simply by mentioning that one of the volunteers made UA-cam videos of the work done out there -- I bet lots of visitors want to meet you out there on the weekends when you might be there. Please keep on making videos of Museum-related repairs like this one when you can. Of course, the repair and other machining videos you make that are not Museum-related are great information too!
Very interesting Valve Keith... I'm wondering is the valve sealed by steam pressure? Or does it seal by pressure from the bolts or valve stem?
I think Brian needs one of these with all the steam he's been making.
How can you get sparks off of brass and grind non ferris metal? Looking good your work is above and beyond. Thanks
He was grinding the face he brazed with the "cast" repair rod. Apparently, the rod has some ferrous material in it.
Could you have cut the ports bigger, put in two sleeves that would have taken the pitting out, then surfaced the top like you did, that would also help stop the pitting on the cast iron near the holes?
GREAT VIDEO !!!
Im curious as to why at the 26:39 mark where you put the collar on the stem to cut off the brass end, why couldn’t you clamp the brass end of the stem into the jaws and cut off the good part from the brass end of the stem?
What was the cast iron brazing rod that you used to build up the valve face?
A particularly interesting video.
Great video as always. One question. You are not afraid that the pin hole will weaken the pressed-in section of the shaft, so that it could break if the handle is torqued to hard?
Yes, it will surely weaken the shaft compared to the original straight from the factory valve. I personally might have brazed the rod on, or at the very least used a smaller spring pin, but I think the repair ought to work for a good long while in any case. It may in fact last decades.
Possibly, but then again there doesn't seem to be any force directly opposing any turning action (other than friction) so I wouldn't expect anyone to try to rip the shaft off...
Ahhh, but this is not just a simple valve it's a BRAKE valve and in an emergency the force applied to the handle may be extreme. Don't forget the end of the original stem was deformed (it may have also been brazed) and the handle attached to the stem was at one point broken and brazed back together. There is the matter of the steam causing resistance, but I think that may be secondary to an emergency brake application with force.
You called it! Lasted only 2 years: ua-cam.com/video/9XdRDP0W-Ng/v-deo.html
Hey Mr. Keith, what do you use for packing material and where do you find it?
You can find graphite impregnated packing material quite a few places... Any number of ebay sellers have it cheap. OR you can type Graphite Packing into google and find hundreds of suppliers.
By any chance would you happen to know the make and number of the brazing rod you used? Was it a high nickle content rod? Thanks
Ask wheelitzr2 in the above comments. He knows all about it!
Keth, when you are all done fixing the leaks that engine will be going too fast LOL
Amazing video!!! What kind of rod did you use? I need some!!!
Why did only the cast iron surface get damaged from the steam? The brass surface doesn't seem damaged at all.
I thought brazing rods were non-ferrous. Why the sparks when surface grinding the brazed material?
Just wondering if you use lock tite on bushings when u press them in
what was the cast iron rod you used?
i have an engine block to repair
Looks a lot like Lawsons Cronatron 22 bare iron.
What is the name of the circular anvil tool (with holes) that you use to hammer in the spring pin at 32:05?
That's a bench block.
which part do you put the jam on?
Quality entertainment.
good job:)
Kieth, my concern is that the steel roll pin may corrode. If it does just use a piece of braze rod instead.
I would be concerned that a braze rod might shear just when you need the brakes. I would have made a stainless rivet out of rod.
I actually agree with this concern - the saving grace might be that where this spring pin is located isn't really a flow path for the steam so the corrosion it would see would likely be minimal. A solid pin or tapered pin would have likely been a superior choice as they can handle more sheer force as well from the torque from the operator actuating the valve (seeing as how the shaft had been bent previously).
Lucky it's a press fit then, and the roll pin is just a security blanket....
Isn't the chamber filled with steam, always? It's most definitely in the steam path.
It might be advantageous to get a stainless steel roll pin to reduce corrosion from the steam in the valve.
I agree - a stainless pin might be a better choice due to risk of corrosion from the steam, plus the fact that the brake valve is a safety-critical component.
enjoyed
That "maintenance" should have been done when you were originally restoring the engine, long before it went on track again. Instead of pinning, how about threading into the valve key, You can then pin it as well. The job turns out well but there are latent - "This will do" in there that are waiting to fail,