“Clayton” Steam Motor Wagon – August update

For the past three months, the Vehicle Group’s Clayton & Shuttleworth Heritage Team have made a start on the restoration of the steam wagon. This has resulted in many bags being filled with parts and labelled and placed into crates ready for cleaning and assessing. This has been a dirty and laborious task as it had to be documented and recorded with photos as we went along.

The box body was removed in June and has now been stored undercover where it is also acting as a store for some of the larger parts such as the water tank. 

The drive gears, connecting rods, pistons and crankshaft (with flywheel still attached) have all been removed, leaving just the cylinder block connected to the boiler barrel.

One of the design features of the steam wagon is that the front of the chassis rails are bolted to brackets on the sides of the boiler barrel, the back of the fire box has a cross member riveted on to that is supported at each side on brackets from the chassis, and the front wheels are attached to the bottom of the smoke box at the front of the boiler. This means that in order to remove the boiler, you have to support the front part of the chassis behind the boiler so it does not fall to the floor when the boiler is unbolted.

A temporary stretcher was bolted across between the chassis rails and then supported on a pair of 7.5 ton truck axle stands loaned to us by the HGV maintenance company based at Home Farm.

At the end of July, the boiler was successfully removed and taken to the boiler works at the beginning of August.