The Home Machinist!

Bill Shields wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 7:19 pm From a manufacturing practicality standpoint=> I would make the handrail in sections..bent to fit.

Ends drilled (or it is pipe to begin with) with internal sleeves to provide alignment..with the joints directly under the balls...or the joints are there in plain sight covered in paint and rust.

That's what I'm thinking. I might just give up on an exact prototypical look and use visible sleeves. Or I could just make the handrails straight, which they are on her sister locomotive. The handrails need to be removable for that time way off in the future when the boiler jacket needs to be removed.

Actually...if you look at the ball end in the second drawing... it looks like it is designed to fit inside a hollow pipe

Bill Shields wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 9:39 pm Actually...if you look at the ball end in the second drawing... it looks like it is designed to fit inside a hollow pipe

Yes. And in the first photo I posted, it sure looks like a pipe coupling at the right edge of the photo. Looks like it was sized for 1-inch pipe.

I keep being drawn back to the little bump over the sand pipe. The guy who installed the handrail had a real compulsion.

Dick_Morris wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 10:23 pm I keep being drawn back to the little bump over the sand pipe. The guy who installed the handrail had a real compulsion.

Yeah. I question whether this was a Baldwin factory installation. I'd think the supervisor would be hollering at the guy to just get it done and quit making it a work of art.

I did some web searching. It looks like the wagon top was typically dealt with by using a straight handrail and longer stand offs towards the front of the boiler. The locomotive you pictured is apparent V&T #26, which is long gone. It had the same bump over the sander pipe on the left side. You didn't tell us that the hand rail continued around the front and down the other side. Here is an image of the handrail on V&T 27, sister of 26, which still exists. It had a similar arrangement but with no bump over the sand pipe. Maybe they did come from Baldwin that way.

Probably some government standard that says the handrail must have a minimum clearance to obstructions

Yes, Dick, it is V&T #26. Like #27, #25 also has straight handrails. It would be interesting if the builder's photo of #26 could be found to see if it came from Baldwin that way, or if some OCD fitter in the V&T shops did that after a shopping. Number 26 lasted until the last month of the V&T in 1950 when she was burned in the Reno engine house fire. She was scrapped later that year. But for the fire she might still be with us today.

It's not clear in the photo, but #27's hand rails had bends to follow the wagon top boiler contour, but not the bump to clear the sand pipe. On #25 the handrails were straight and used longer stand offs at the front.

Luck was on my side when I installed the handrails on my 1401. I made my handrail in 2 pieces. There was a straight piece of handrail that ran along the boiler. This was strait forward to do. I mounted the stanchions to the boiler and fed the straight part of the handrail into the stanchions.

Then there was the piece of the handrail that had all the bends in it to clear the feedwater heater pipes. The one piece with all the bends has a hidden joint in a stanchion ball. I bent the handrail with the smokebox stanchions on it. The stanchions are mounted to the smokebox with studs clear drilled into the smokebox and 10-32 nuts on the end of the studs.

Very clever, Michael. I've thought about this, but am still trying to figure out how to keep the one that jumps over the sander pipes from flopping around. I could put them in with Loctite, or soft solder, but that introduces the problem of disassembly at some future date. OTOH, perhaps I should just go with that and worry about taking it apart when the time comes. I still wonder how the prototype ones were done.

Loctite now....later just wave a torch at it and loctite will fall apart. Protect painted surfaces with ceramic or sheet metal ...or both

Or broach the center bore hex and use a hex key as the coupler...