KatysBlog

I am working from home today (getting over a cold) listening to the
contractors in my backyard ripping the floor out of WP668, our caboose.
From what we can tell, half of the flooring is in good shape but the
other half is too damaged to save.

The floor consists of steel beams supporting 4″x4″ wood joists supporting
an underfloor (wood tongue and groove boards laid crosswise) supporting the
floor (wood tongue and groove boards laid lengthwise). The steel is solid but
the three layers of wood are rotted out from water from both top (kitchen and
toilet) and bottom (thrown up from the wheels). There are also charred boards on
the underfloor near where the old stove was. We knew from replacing the
roof that WP668 had a roof fire sometime in the past. It looks like that
fire ate a hole in the floor too. (We did not see the charring before because it
was covered with a floor patch.) The contractors are ripping out the
damaged wood now. Once that is gone, we can evaluate how solid the remainder is.
We want the finished floor to be solid, flat, and level. The final surface will be
linoleum, so the replacement wood will be plywood rather than tongue and
groove boards.

Last weekend, we planted an Evergreen Pear tree (Pyrus Kawakamii) near WP668.
It will eventually shade both the caboose and the cactus garden which we are planting
between there and the house. The little tree is now in flower and its fragile
white blooms are in danger every time the contractors toss a board out the
caboose window. John is out with the contractors now to minimize damage to both
WP668 and the surrounding garden.

Last week, Chris Gremich* and John re-created the steel ladders at each
end of WP668, our backyard caboose. The original ladders had been cut into
pieces long ago. Chris used the remnants of the rusty scap
1943 ladders as a pattern to bend new galvanized steel pipes. He created
the rungs from steel pipe once the side pieces were in place. It took
about nine hours to go from new pipe to finished ladders on the caboose.
The ladders are about eleven feet tall (bent and cut from sixteen foot
pieces of 1-1/4″ pipe).

John is learning more about fancy welding by watching Chris work. I, in turn,
am learning simple

MIG (metal inert gas) welding from John. I have made three
plant stands out of scrap steel.

* Chris is “The Iron Expert” of CG Designs in San Jose, CA, phone: 408-313-3706

Here is what WP668 looked like with her original ladders intact, in 1974:

Photo used with permission of S. Roger Kirkpatrick

Here are some ladder restoration photos:

Original ladder scrap

Installing new rails

1st ladder done

looking up ladder

making 2nd ladder

Chris leveling a rung

John on roof

Chris Gremich

Katy’s 1st plant stand

Katy’s rail spike plant stand

Images Copyright 2007 by Katy Dickinson