Well last week we assembled the rockers to the frame of this coach body. I've got to do
a little fine tuning, put the cross members in, and adjust some iron work. Then we're going to
tackle this driver's box. We need to figure out what is original and what is aftermarket.
Well now that I have my cross members in for the floorboard I can see that my braces for these
rockers are not quite on track. I've got to do a little tweaking on these.
I didn't realize that these irons would be quite so far out of whack,
but I've got them pretty close now. Typically, on a higher
quality coach, this would be a framed in seat with inset panels, but I think, because of this iron, this
was probably just a solid slab similar to, like a farm wagon seat.
But I've got it to where it
should make contact full distance on on these irons here. I can see I've been kind of fighting
the focus on this camera to try to get you to see that we're making full contact here.
So I'm going to take the back cross frame off of this. We'll clean it up and see what it looks like.
Well this is the left side of this driver's box and we're going to salvage this hand hold.
We've got a boot hook here, the step,
but once I got this back end off
it opens up inside this back piece of iron and I'm now more convinced that this was a patch job.
So you can see there's a set of carriage bolts that the heads are underneath this iron. And then
there's a set of carriage bolts that goes through this iron, makes me again think this iron is a
patch job. And we go up here, there's several of them. There's another one here that is underneath.
I think these were perhaps more original, all these carriage bolts that the heads were underneath.
And you can also see these bolts that go through this iron are very erratic. See this bolt here is
underneath this iron, and it's pretty centered up here. These other two bolts that include this iron,
one almost missed it, the other is offset. This bolt is in the center, and it's underneath this iron.
This one is way to the side. This one's not bad here. Then this one, this is the one that's under
the iron, this is the one that was because of the iron again offset, so these all seem to be pretty
centered up. So these three here are a little more centered up, a little more careful on how they were
assembled. These others are a little erratic. I've been kind of eager to take this back side off
so I could see what's underneath. I'm just going to go ahead and cut this old patch off.
So these three carriage bolts here were the ones that went through just the back panels,
and these others are what held the patch on. This is all to the inside of the driver's box.
This is the outside. Again I think this was a patch job. I'm going to
sneak underneath these bolts here to see if I can't get those snipped off.
And I'll cut apart what would be the right side of this driver's box.
This also shows three carriage bolts underneath this patched iron.
So there's also some evidence here of some screws that were used. There's a couple there.
This is so rotted out I can't see the makings of any others. These two carriage bolts were
actually side by side. We have one on the top and two in the middle. The one down here is missing.
So these are the patch irons. These went down the sides and these were the irons that were on
the back that sandwiched underneath the original carriage bolts that heads were still underneath.
So these I'm not going to put back on, so there's no need to clean them up. So this is a step that's
off of the left side. I'll sand blast that. These are the two hand holds, right and left,
that are not even close to the same, but they are what they are. Like I say, I think these went vertical
instead of horizontal. I'll sand blast those.
And these are the back framing of the driver's box.
This would be the right side, this would be the left side, and they stood up like so.
So a couple things that I've noticed on these, they are uniform hole spacings,
and I'll show you how they match the front irons. But I also noticed the uniformity of
these original bolts. This one is gone, but the two correlate, and then this one that had two,
this one had two, this one only had one, but you can see the hole here where the other one was.
So there's a pair there, and then these two correlate with each other. So this is the right side. This is
the outside of the box. this is the rear. This would have been replacement for this framework here.
So as I put these up against the front, these have double hole spacings,
and these also have the same double hole spacings that correlate with the front irons.
And it's also the same on the left side. Well these double hole spacings
are showing the width of the sideboards on the driver's box. The joint of the board would be
right through the center of these double hole spacings. And it's the same on this rear iron as well.
So the thing that stands out that is odd, that I think was changed in the wreck,
is that the carriage heads of these bolts are on the inside of this iron.
This side here, the carriage bolts were on the outside because the carriage head goes up against
the wood and the nut is up against the iron. But I think when this outside piece of iron was added as
a patch, these bolts were replaced; heads were on the inside with the exposed nuts on the outside,
which is non-typical for any type of carriage work. The heads would be against the wood, the nut would
be against the iron. That's the only discrepancy I see. There is a little bit of difference in
the height here, and it may be, I'm not really quite sure why that is, if this was recessed down
into it or if I just have my measurements just to fuzz off. We're about a half inch
difference in height between these two, so I'm going to have to adjust this iron somehow.
This is the iron off of the right side, I cut it off of the wood.
We're setting just a little tall.
This one is maybe 3/8 of an inch off. So if I try to invert this and put it on the same side,
because this end is shorter, these two holes line up closer, these two are a little low, but these
center two are way off. And what's happened is these side boards are different widths.
So the bottom side board looks like we're about 11 and a half, the middle side board is
nine and a half to nine and three quarters, and our top side board is 11 and a quarter.
So because of the difference in the widths here these have to go in their correct position.
So what I'll probably end up doing is I'll just trim this off a little bit to drop this down
to get these to line up, to make them work. But this iron goes on the right side and
this iron will go on the left side. Again I can just shorten this up here and I'll have to do
that on the cross frame as well to get these to coordinate, but I think we can make that happen.
Well this continues to be a bit of a puzzle, but it's coming together, piece by piece.
Hopefully we're going to see the whole picture eventually.
I appreciate you following along. Thanks for watching!