It's great to see what Paul and the others plan to do on this Climax, and I look forward to seeing her fight the grades out of Felton.
The boiler to be used on the rebuild of #5 is from the Baker White Pine #3, a 45-ton Climax that ran on the BWP line that fed the Sumpter Valley. Just to add a little to the discussion, as far as the #3 goes, she was obviously a big 3' Climax. She was also very well liked by all accounts (I was good friends with an ex-Oregon Lumber Company engineer whose Dad ran the #3 for years). The only thing he ever mentioned as a weak point was not center-of-gravity, but actually the line shaft. Apparently the BWP Climax's broke theirs with enough regularity that a fairly high pucker-factor existed when the #3 was being shoved off the hill and onto the huge Curry line trestle by a string of loaded log cars. The fear was that the shaft would break and "jill poke" into the ties, flipping the engine off the trestle and the crew to certain death many feet below.
As an interesting aside, the same man who related this story to me also fired on the West Side in the early '40's and saw their Shay #6 at the bottom of a fill where she had come to rest after her final tumble as the result of being a little too top heavy, as related by Mr. Knoob earlier in this thread.
Casey