Interesting rebuild. We did the same process with our 1913 Sawyer Massey engine, but unlike these folks we actually did the rebuild twice. After the boiler was partially finished by The Boilersmith we drilled and mounted studs for holding various castings some of which were extremely heavy. Everything was fitted up and adjusted by master mechanic Bill "Bim" Watson (and in his case without the use of overhead cranes like this crew). After we were satisfied that everything was exactly where it was suppose to be, everything was disassembled again and the boiler returned to The Boilersmith for heat treating to relieve any stresses caused by our drilling and tapping and mounting of studs. That done, the tubes were then installed and the finished boiler returned to us. Of course the reassembly went much smoother the second time around. For us the rebuild took 2 years of effort, but the results are well worth it. The cloverleaf stamp on the backhead and the recent boiler make for a much calmer boiler inspector...as it should. After removing the huge castings that had been bolted to the outside firebox wrapper for 80 years it was apparent that water that had seeped in between them had caused considerable wastage of the wrapper sheet, but of course impossible to d-meter on account of its location. The 7/16" outer wrapper had wasted to less than half of that. On a side mount plow engine pretty much all of the stresses are absorbed by the firebox, much like the difference between a unibody car and one with a full frame, which a rear mount plowing engine would resemble. Needless to say we were greatly relieved to know we had made the right choice to replace the boiler in its entirety.

I do love the English efforts in industrial preservation. They do some amazing grass roots stuff.

As far as 600 rivets in a day, that's pretty good. In the Guinness World Book of Records not too many years ago (maybe 20) they used to include the maximum number of rivets driven by one man in one work shift. It is a little over 10,000. Yes, that is ten thousand, in a shipyard in Great Britain. I don't have the book at hand but it might be Belfast. They don't define shift, 8, 10, 12 hours, nor do they tell us how many buckers, bolters and fitters they went through, still that is absolute amazing.

I am interested in the reproduction of the lap seam construction. I am not fearful of lap seams but having been given the opportunity to rivet up a new barrel on a boiler that had been lap seam I chose to do so in double strap butt configuration. It just seemed to be prudent.

The pneumatic pinch riveter was cool.

Great video. Thanks to Matt for pointing it out.

I know nothing about riveting, but do notice that 10,000 rivets in twelve hours works out to 13.9 rivets/minute, or one every 4.3 seconds.

It does call into account the veracity of the entry however the World Book of Records is generally pretty good at their documentation. Just because it's a ship yard we can't assume that the rivets driven are large nor do we know how long a shift it was. We also don't know how many rivets passed inspection and how many had to be knocked out and re-driven by the next shift.

I imagine it was set up like 10 miles of track in a day on the transcontinental railroad. Planned, staged, executed, and not something that could be done two days in a row.

Still it is a pretty cool entry.