It’s not often that we take group pictures here but the engine work created the occasion. So here is the team before we started touching the engine: From left to right: Will, Mike, Dave, Gary, Elsa and Tina. Eric was off that day so below is another one where he actually was the center of [...]

After two weeks of intense work on the Monitor’s vibrating side lever steam engine, we shifted efforts towards preparing it for electrolytic reduction treatment over the next three months.   Electrolytic reduction is a conservation treatment for metal artifacts in which the object is connected to the negative side of an electric circuit, called the ‘cathode’.  [...]

I forgot to post this image of the port side of the engine.  It shows alot of the areas that aren’t visible in the image in the previous blog post.  As I write this, we are transfering treatment solution back into the engine tank to keep the engine wet and prevent corrosion over the weekend.  [...]

We are wrapping up our second week of deconcretion in the engine tank.  It was a particulary exciting week because we continued to expose more original surfaces of the engine.   This may sound silly, but the engine is starting to look more like an engine!  In addition to deconcretion, we also began planning for our [...]

As mentioned in Dave’s blog of Nov 22nd, our whole department got to play with hammers, chisels and other air-scribes while on the engine this week. The feeling that conservation is somehow (or sometimes?) close to mining was strongly emphasized by having on average of eight people confined in a tank, hammering from 9am to [...]