Sleepers

To say that resleepeeing today was a success might be a little of an overstatement, as upon installing the 15th sleeper of the day… the ram that connects the two halves of the grabs fell off.

In reality, it ended up being very fixable, as it had just cracked around the weld and a simple trip to Castlemaine to pull the ram out of the grabs and re-weld the nuckle to the ram was only a few hours inconvenience.

It’s quite remarkable that the weld hadn’t let go sooner, as it had some evidence of an aged crack once on the workbench, not that you would ever have detected it when still on the grabs.

Anyhow, after deciding to double the amount of weld, compared to the factory amount (which was actually probably quite sufficient, likely just a minor welding defect when constructed) and a good solid test, it’s now as good as new! The one thing that really impressed us was the ease with which we were able to pull the grabs apart and reassemble, very happy with that feature.

Given what we’ve put these grabs through, we could hardly complain, they’ve done some amazingly hard tasks.

Once the excitement and heroic effort of the workshop staff got us out of trouble – thanks Bazz and Harry, we returned to site to get another 31 sleepers installed, taking us up to 45 for the day, had we not lost 3.5hrs to this, we’d probably have completed from Boundary Trk to Sawmill Rd.

We’ll have a red hot crack at doing that tomorrow however. We will be meeting at Boundary Trk from 8.30am, however, we’re really closer to Sawmill Rd now, so if you arrive much after 8.45am, it’s probably best to head straight to Sawmill Rd and walk up.