Restoration of an Engine

By 1962, I had a low bed float of my own and I believe I trucked
the engine to the 1962 show. I trucked that engine to many shows
for the next few years. It was always a favourite of mine.

I remember one time, I was trucking the engine to the Ploughing
Match at the Massey Ferguson Farms at Milliken. I had two engines
on the float. In order to get two on, the one on the front had to
have its front wheels up on the gooseneck of the trailer. I
don’t remember why the Sawyer was on the front, but it was. We
were trucking up a storm along Number 8 Highway through Galt,
Ontario. There was a railroad bridge. It looked high enough, but it
wasn’t. I can remember looking out the rear window, just in
time to see the smokestack coming down the road beside the trailer,
end over end, in a lot of pieces. I stopped and gathered up the
pieces and thought, ‘Oh my gosh. What am I going to do
now?’ I had to have the engine ready for the show the next day
but I couldn’t take it to the Ploughing Match in that
condition.

So, I came back to Milton and went to see my friend Ernie Baty.
Ernie was somewhat of a genius with a welding rod, and he spent all
night piecing the smokestack back together, while I slept in the
cab. Next morning, we put it back on. Ernie got some black paint
and we were on our way, as good as new, or almost! I eventually
told Bill Johnson about our mishap, but not for a year or two. He
said he had never noticed anything.

Well, one day I was trucking the engine home from the Milton
show. I was informed the engine was to go to Woodstock, as it had
been bought by Winn Nichols. We took it to a barn that Winn had
rented near Woodstock. Several years passed. One night at the
Milton Steam Show, Winn was complaining about the fact he had to
get the engine out and tested for another year, the hand holds put
in, and so on. I said to him that I thought the best thing he could
do with the engine was to sell it to me. Winn thought for a moment,
looked at me, and said, ‘Maybe.’

In 1974, the International Ploughing Match was to be held in our
area, the County of Halton. I was chairman of the Antique
Committee, and things were going well. I saw Winn Nichols one day
about bringing the engine to the Ploughing Match. He said,
‘Yes, I will bring it, but you can take it home.’ So it was
in this way that I became the proud owner of Sawyer Massey Engine
No. 3368 in the fall of 1974.

We Enjoyed the Engine

I had never run a steam engine before. My dad never did have a
steam engine on the farm. His first power after horses was an 8-16
International Tractor, bought new in 1918 (and that’s another
story!). I was like a big kid with a new toy. We soon learned by
trial and error what to do and not to do.

I had two young sons who were eager to get at it too in their
mid-teens at the time. We took the engine to steam shows and
ploughing matches all around the area. We would go to five or six
shows a year with it. It was easy then because we had our own
trucking company and did a lot of moving in and out for general
shows. So, we would take our engine, too.

After a few years, I thought it would be nice if we had a water
wagon tank to go with the engine. I searched and searched for one
but none were to be had that were any good. I approached a man who
was excellent at wood-working and asked him to build me a new water
tank from cedar. George McKinnless was his name and he lived in
Walkerton, Ontario.

George was a barn framer by trade and he knew all there was to
know about wood-working he had been doing it all his life. I told
him what I wanted and he said he would see what he could do. I
didn’t hear from George then, for a year or two. One day, I saw
him at a show and he said, ‘Say, Sherwood, your water tank is
about finished.’ I couldn’t believe my ears! I went to see
him at his home, and lo, and behold, out behind the garage on two
saw-horses, was a brand new water tank. It was made from cedar, all
tongue and grooved, put together with rods around it, half round
bottom, and flat on top just like the picture in the book that
George had. He said, ‘ Sorry it took so long. I had a hard job
to find enough two inch cedar with no knots.’ I looked it over
closely, and yes, George, there were no knots. He said, ‘Oh,
you couldn’t have knots, because some day they might
leak.’

We brought the tank home, mounted it on a wagon, and hooked it
up to the engine. Now, I could take enough wood and water with me
for half a day. What a joy that was!

I think the biggest and best thing we ever did was to take the
engine, sawmill, shingle mill, threshing machine, and several
tractors to the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE). The CNE
celebrated its 100th birthday in 1978. I was invited to take a
selection of my equipment to Toronto for the entire length of the
exhibition twenty days. A deal was struck with the management and
we were there. Part of the requirement was to go in the parade. The
parade at that time was ten miles long. We put hard rubber tractor
tires on the wheels of the steam engine and we were trucked off to
the Toronto CNE grounds. The first day was parade day and we left
the CNE grounds about 7:00 AM. to go to Queen’s Park, the
parliament buildings for the province of Ontarioa distance of about
ten miles.

I was going up Spadina Avenue with the engine, water tank full
of water with wood on top, and threshing machine. The reach broke
in the wagon, So, there we were! What to do!! We had taken chains
and binders and some jacks with us. We got it jacked up and pulled
back together with the equipment we had. We arrived at Queen’s
Park just as the parade was pulling out at 1 PM. We were nearly out
of water in the tank. Luckily, the fire department truck drove up
beside us. I quickly got off the engine and went over to them to
ask for water. No problem! They put about 600 gallons in the wagon
in a matter of minutes. It was a very sunny day, and hot. We made
it back to the CNE grounds about 4:30 PM, right on time.

The rest of the twenty days was spent right by the front door of
the Coliseum. We sawmilled and cut shingles had a good time. It was
hard work, but the crowds every day did love to see the engine work
on the sawmill. I was glad when the twenty days were over and we
had everything moved back home. It was a good time a time I will
never forget.

We participated in shows and parades in the following years
Santa Claus parades and so on.

Finally, in the spring of 1987, the boiler plate proved to be
too thin to be safe. The engine had to be retired. We looked at
doing repairs, but that was useless. One thing would be done, and
then another would crop up. In the summer of the same year, we put
the engine away until we could decide what to do, financially as
well. It was a hard decision because we enjoyed the engine so much.
The boiler inspector had said no more, so without a ticket on the
boiler, we were out of business.

How and Why and What For

I went all over the country looking at engines, at boilers,
talking to owners, and discussing what to do with my engine. I went
to Pennsylvania to talk to Willis Abel. He said he could do boiler
repairs, had done lots of them. He had several engines and did an
excellent job. I never saw any better repairs made to a boiler than
at Willis Abel’s shop. However, the more I talked and the more
questions I asked, it became more and more apparent to me that a
whole new boiler was the only answer. With repairs, several
thousand dollars are put into a boiler, and you still have an old
boiler. No one seemed to want to build a whole new boiler. I
couldn’t understand why not. Well, I soon found out why.
Insurance. Insurance was so heavy for liability that no one wanted
to touch it. I talked to and corresponded with a man in Ireland
that I had met at Willis Abel’s. He would build me a new
boiler, but it would be almost impossible to have it A.S.M.E.
approved. I forgot the idea, quick. It had to pass in Ontario.

I found out something that not too many people know, and not
many were willing to tell. To manufacture a new boiler to be used
in Ontario, the blueprints must be signed by an Ontario Resident
Engineer. No engineer would sign someone else’s blueprints. So,
we ended up in Seaforth, Ontario, to see a man by the name of
Charlie Smith.

Charlie had his own company making boilers, every day of the
week. He was an engineer in his own right. It just so happens that
Charlie’s ancestors owned the Robert Bell Engine and Thresher
Company at Seaforth. This company made steam engines and threshers
for many, many years. When they were through, Charlie bought the
company, land, buildings, machinery, and all. A new company came
out of all this called ‘Boilersmith.’ Charlie had built
some boilers for engines before mine and has made many more since.
He came and looked at my engine, made some notes, and went back
home. I shortly received a quote for a new boiler.

All this took about five years. We did not move on it quickly.
Now, the decision to act was on my shoulders. Should we go for a
new boiler or not. My wife was very supportive of the idea because
she enjoyed the engine as much as I did. She had driven the engine
in many parades, gone to many shows, ploughed with it. She wanted
to see it fixed as much as I did. Questions were asked and
discussed if we spent all that money on the boiler, would the
engine be worth it afterwards? Would it sell some day for enough to
get our money back? Would there be a buyer out there somewhere? I
did a lot of digging and asking, and talked to a lot of men.
Strangely enough, I got the feeling that it would be worth it, that
it would be a saleable commodity if it were fixed and put on the
market. As it was, it was five cents a pound. So, in the summer of
1992, the decision was reached in our house that we would buy a new
boiler for the steam engine for about $30,000. We would keep it and
play with it. When it got to be a burden, it would go. Then someone
else could play with it. I have never regretted that decision to
this day.

Getting the Restoration Started

So having made that decision, how was I to get started? To
install a new boiler is a mammoth undertaking. Where was I to
start? What was I to do first? More importantly, who was going to
do it? I decided I would not tackle this big a project in my own
shop. Oh, I have a shop big enough for the job, physically, but I
did not feel 1 had the expertise to complete the project. 1 talked
to several people, some who had a hand in doing one before, but to
no avail, they did not want to do another.

I talked to my good friend, William ‘Bim’ Watson. Now,
Bim had put a steam engine together before, some years ago for
himself. He and his brother, Peter, had done it. Bim had a shop of
his own at Carlisle, Ontario, about ten miles from my place. I
talked to Bim about it on several occasions, and the more I talked
about it, the more of a challenge it seemed to be.

Bim is the kind of guy who loves a challenge something he can
really get into, something he can sink his teeth into. So, after
much thought and pondering, he agreed that, if I wanted, he would
do his best. Now, Bim’s ‘best’ does not come easy, it
has to be perfect or as close to perfection as humanly possible, or
it is no good at all. Being close or as good as one can do, is not
good enough for Bim. It has to be better than that.

Now I must go back here a little to more of the history of the
engine. When the boiler of the engine failed to pass inspection by
the Ontario Pressure Vessels Branch of the Ministry of Consumer and
Commercial Relations (M.C.C.R.), naturally, I thought that all I
had to do was ask, what do I do to get it passed? Simple answer, I
thought. Alas, no simple answer was forthcoming. Being the
government bureaucrats that they were, there were no simple
answers. The inspector said he thought the boiler fire box was thin
and ordered an ultrasonic depth meter test. It proved he was right.
He suggested we cut out the side plates on the fire box, inside the
boiler. We hired a ticketed boiler welder to come to our farm and
do this. New plates for each side were ordered and received and
made ready for installation. Stay bolts seemed to be fine, but the
inside sheet at the top of the mud ring was thin. Not much to weld
to. The mud ring itself is cast iron and rivetted in, and you can
not weld to it. So, the inspector looked at it again and decided
that even if we did put the side plates in, it still would not
pass. At this point, we should have quit. But, we did not we had
the side plates put in, and all looked well. However, when we did a
hydrostat test, we had leaks at the mud ring. However, as is usual
after a few repairs were made, we decided to fire it up. As long as
we kept lots of water in it, what could go wrong, we thought. We
fired it up, not just for an hour or two, but for two days. The mud
ring leaks were minimal, they pretty well took up. But, the crown
sheet over the fire box leaked like Niagara Falls. What were we to
do? That’s why the decision was made in the summer of 1987 to
put it away in the shed, for another day.

On October 10, 1992, we hired trucker Jamie McBay to take the
engine to Bim’s shop at Carlisle. That was the start of the
physical restoration, and it also turned out to be a day when I was
very sick. I remember going in my pickup, but I don’t remember
coming home. However, I soon got over it, whatever it was, and was
eager to get at the dismantling of the engine.

Dismantling and Rebuilding

Now, I couldn’t spend every day at Bim’s shop. I had
business to attend to and other things we still had to make a
living. Also, I wanted to let Bim work at his own speed. So, when I
could, I would go there and help him with the dismantling process.
We took my John Deere forklift to his shop to lift the pieces that
were too heavy to lift by hand. We soon realized that there were
not many pieces that could be lifted by hand. Everything was heavy.
The first main job was to remove the main crank shaft across the
top, which we did without much trouble. However, I did break the
eccentric ring doing this, but later when it was welded, it was as
good as new. The castings were held to the boiler with
seventy-eight studs, inch in size, with nuts. We got some of the
nuts off by heating them, but never did get any one stud out of the
boiler.

After we had got all the nuts off the studs, we still could not
loosen the castings on the studs. They were rusted right on there.
We finally had to take the torch and blow all the stud away, right
down into the hole in the casting. They were on there, tight, very
tight. They had been there seventy-six years, and were not about to
give up very easily.

Finally, they were all off. The big back wheels weigh about a
ton each, but were no trouble to handle with the forklift. The
castings that hold those wheels to the boiler now that was quite
another matter! They weigh five hundred to eight hundred pounds
each and there are two of them on each side. This proved to be the
hardest job so far. Eventually, as we persisted, they came loose
and were removed. Under the big castings that held the back wheels
on, there was about half an inch of scale rust. No oil had ever got
down there and over the years, as water from the wheels had
entered, rust had formed under the castings.

I would not have believed this if I had not seen it. There was
no rust under the engine castings, as oil had got there, but under
the rear wheel castings, it was a mess. We also ran into some cold
weather, as this was all done outside, and we were held up for a
time. Finally, in the week before Christmas of 1992, the old boiler
was bare and we had no trouble picking it up and putting it onto my
tag-along trailer for the trip to Seaforth, Ontario.

Boiler smith Company at Seaforth wanted the old boiler to check
it out exactly for measurements on the blueprints of the new
boiler. Some interesting facts came to light at this point. First
of all, the old boiler at the firebox end was one inch wider at the
bottom than at the top of the side of the firebox. In other words,
the firebox of the boiler did not have parallel sides it was one
inch wider at the bottom. This difference would have to be
accommodated for when reassembly began because the new boiler was
built in jigs and was exactly parallel. The old boiler is
³/₈ inch smaller in the centre section than
it is at the firebox end or at the smoke box end. In other words,
the barrel is two pieces, one inside the other, a two-piece barrel.
On the smaller piece, about three feet long, there are five
castings studded to the boiler. Now, the new boiler would be
perfectly straight all the way through. So these old castings were
all on the wrong curvature for the new boiler. They were all
³/₈ inch too small. What to do?

We loaded up all the castings in the pickup and took them to a
machine shop in Stratford, Ontario. We had them put in a big radial
boring machine and turn out ³/₈ inch of each
casting. They were more than an inch thick, so there was lots of
material. They did an excellent job, because when we came to
reassembly, everything fit just fine.

All the parts lay out in the snow during the winter of ’92 –
’93. Sometimes I would look at them and wonder if it would ever
run again. They were a sorry looking sight just a bunch of junk,
but I had confidence in Bim’s ability to make something out of
it, so I did not say much. When spring came and the sun got warmer,
we had to get back to the engine and parts. We decided that all the
parts should be sandblasted and painted. I inquired at several
places about getting this done but nobody seemed much interested in
doing the parts as parts. If we put it together again and brought
them as a whole machine, lots were quite willing to sandblast and
paint the whole thing. As parts, no one was much interested.

So, Bim thought he could get a guy to come there with a portable
sandblaster truck and do the job. He came and looked and gave us a
price on doing all the parts. About ten tons of parts! We struck a
deal and on the appointed day, he came. He was there quite early
one day in March. He worked all day sandblasting and priming the
parts. It was a bigger job than it looked and took longer than
anticipated, so I paid him more than his contracted price.

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