Russ

Have you talked with the Durango & Silverton guys to see what grease they use and if they have any concerns with what to use if unable get good grease anymore?

Dan

SP did, and 4449 does, use pressure-feed oil for the driver boxes. SP developed the system long ago.

Grease (and oil for that matter) is a lot like water treatment. Everybody has their own
"miracle, mystery formula," which seems to work fine in some places and operations and not at all in others.

I watched a mechanic trim up a grease block to fit a K-36 driver axle cellar box on the D&S. This was in about 1993 though, so it could be completely different. By now.

The cellar had a spring loaded platform to apply the grease to the underside of the axle, typical arrangement.

It looked like the hard grease that Shop Services sold at the time, but I do not know any specifics. It was hard and heavy.

On the "project" I am working on, we are going with rollers on the pony and trailing trucks, with oil cellars on the drivers, as well as rollers on the tender.

.

Good plan.

I can very well remember hot footing it into Antonito on the top side of the legal limit (22mph) on a summer afternoon and finding most every crown brass in the 180-200 degree range. The old Grande-heads told me if you spit on the box and it sizzled it was getting warm. If the oil was boiling on the top, you needed to tell the roundhouse about it. It seemed to me that cellar grease did not begin to move around the journal until it warmed up to 150 degrees.

BTW, the Grande like to hard-pipe Keeley hoses to all the driving boxes of their engines. I've seen pics of them on 470's, some 490's still have them, never saw one set up on a 480 though.

Thanks to all for the input and information. It is good to know that the Armstrong Oilers are indeed available again. I have heard good things about them and plan to use them on our test subject.

I know of at least one engine that was converted using pressure fed oil to the top of the crown brass. The Lahaina, Kaanapali and Pacific used this method on one of their 2-4-2s that they converted. There was no pad or lubricator in the cellar box as a supplement which proved to be a problem when one of the lubricator feeds failed causing that bearing to overheat quite rapidly. After that, I believe they made that modification and the system worked very well.

Has anyone come up with a successful method of adding a dust seal between the top edge of the cellar box and journal to reduce the infiltration of dirt and water into the oil? We tried a simple version of this on the 401 at Monticello. It consisted of a U shaped neoprene channel that fit over the top edge of the sides of the cellar box. I am not sure how effective it was since it did not uniformly contact the journal surface like a normal shaft seal would but it did reduce the gap somewhat.

Simple lab analysis of the product prior to attempting to apply the grease to the locomotive would have prevented any grease from "running out the bottom". An understanding of acceptable parameters in the products one uses negates the the "trial and error".

The first locomotive to utilize the replicated hytex-8 was the NKP 765. Do you think they just said "sure, throw it in our rods as we run down NS"? Quite not. The lab sample of the grease went to one of the two labs in the United States which is capable of analyzing an NLGI 8+ grease. The results came back showing an ISO 460-480 oil, 53% soap content, and a drop point of 420 degrees (the first full batch actually achieved a drop point of 440 degrees, both out perform hytex).

After having documented the temperatures of all rod temperatures for several weeks of class 1 operation and knowing all bearings run within about 3 degrees of their partner on the other side, the new grease was utilized on one side of the locomotive in all main pin fittings for her adventure to St Louis and return. The rod temperature on the side with the new grease was 15-18 degrees cooler than the opposite side.


As a side note regarding conversion to oil, I would urge anyone who does so to not follow the SP practice (as was utilized on 630 and 4501) UNLESS you have a drop table, Whiting screw jacks or equivalent. The reason being, after a plain bronze bearing (whether oil or grease lubricated) becomes fussy it can most often times be reclaimed in place by simply jacking a locomotive several inches to gain access to the bearing surface as well as providing the ability to polish an axle. When babbitted bearing runs hot there is often damage done which would require removing the bearing box from the locomotive...... food for thought.


Cheers, Jason

In my case, I wasn't referring to pin dope. I was talking about grease in the cellars of the driving axles.
We were sold some of the glop I mentioned melting and was described as the next best thing, even better than Hy-Tex 8. We tried it in one cellar and it was crap.
I always bought pin dope from Doyle and we had a turd squeezer from the SR Irondale shop and a press and made our own from blocks and rolled in graphite. Never had a moment's trouble with rod grease.
Someone was always encouraging us to try this or that on the driving axles. We were wise enough to not do it. I would not adulterate the good Texaco grease with oil or anything else.

[quote="jasonsobczynski
As a side note regarding conversion to oil, I would urge anyone who does so to not follow the SP practice (as was utilized on 630 and 4501)Cheers, Jason[/quote]

OK, Jason - what's your advice about how best to do it? And, is babbit really necessary in crown brasses? I've never had the chance to dig into tribology like you have.

With all the bearing talk lately, have any steam engines recently experienced failures of roller bearings? How was that fixed? Roller bearings are nice, but one thing seems evident...when a plain bearing is having issues, you could do some jerry rigging and limp home. If a roller bearing pukes its guts out, it's pretty ugly.

The poster child for that is Great Smoky Mountain RR - unfortunately the gentleman who would have known the most about it is no longer with us. My understanding is that he adapted the standard boxes on the driver axles to accept the roller bearings by removing the crown brasses and fabricating new cellars to hold the roller bearings ODs - then, he pressed the wheel centers off, turned the axles down to fit into the rollers IDs, remounted the wheels, put the boxes on and it ran for some time successfully in this configuration but didn't last as well as it was expected to. I got a fast look at it without being able to get too close one day - wish I had better information. What's interesting about it is that the bearings were free to float up and down separately in each box on the same axle, instead of being mounted in a common carrier that held them in a specific alignment. I have wondered if this was the reason it didn't pass the test of time.

I hope there is some further discussion of this particular design upcoming.

If these were flat or, more probably, tapered roller bearings, a design like this would be unwise' I can see compromise of tribology. distortion and differential wear of the races, and brinelling being a couple of potential results. I thought the adoption of the 'cannon box' and some cognate structures like the cross-tube in the original Timken floating-driver-bearing arrangement were specifically purposed to avoid this issue ...

Presumably tapered roller bearings would have been mounted 'cones-in' which would have put extra stress on the hub liners or inside pedestal liners. Were areas like those associated with either progressive cause or final failure?

I had thought that one of the advantages of the general SKF 'barrel' bearing was precisely that it could accommodate for shaft misalignment more easily than other types. However, I'd also expect that the precise contour of the 'barrels' and races would have to correspond to the arc specified for rod bushings where lateral-motion compensation is provided, to allow the rods to move 'sideways' while still providing power. It also brings up what happens to the individual bearings on an engine that is longitudinally but not cross-equalized on the particular axle(s) - self-alignment might be correct only if the alignment is around the center of the axle, which wouldn't be the case for cross-joints and so forth...

Somebody should alert the 2472 and 4449 people about the shortcomings of the SP system.

Regarding GSMR, I can't recall ever seeing a reliable "post-mortem" on that.

Was it a failure of the bearings on one axle or did all of them fail?

Did they fail all at once?

What was the failure mode?

Was it an inappropriate application (size or type of the bearings)?