Earl,
Thanks for sharing your photos from July 1976. I hired on as a machinist in April of 1975 with the main objective of getting into engine service, and with the much-appreciated cooperation of Bernie Watts and John Oldberg, I was lucky enough to get a few trips in the cab. The trip you photographed had to be one of my earliest on the right side of the cab, though I was still a couple years from being promoted. If you'd have had a telephoto lens, you would surely have seen a big grin on my face, as I was in hog(ger) heaven.
I built the crankpin grinder you mentioned, which was conceived and designed by Bob Keller. It did a good job of making the main crankpins round again, though the surface finish was not the best. Clearly, it could have used some improvements, but as an experimental prototype, it was satisfactory.
In the early spring of 1976, 484 received the first running gear overhaul attempted by the C&TS. As you mentioned, the machine shop was quite primitive, consisting of a 1910 vintage Lodge & Shipley 16" lathe, a pedestal grinder, and a small bench-mounted drill press. Bob Keller ordered the bronze castings for the side rod bushings in the winter, and when I got home from sea in the spring, we began the overhaul. All the bores in the side rods were egg shaped, and with no means of re-boring them, we installed (with sledge hammers) the newly-machined bushings into the oblong bores, which, of course, resulted in oblong bushing bores. These were then fitted up to the oblong crankpins. Pretty crude, but it amounted to an improvement over what we had before and allowed us to squeeze a few more seasons out of 484.
The 487 was the first engine to try the crankpin grinder in the spring of 1977. In addition, I loaded up all the side rods into the back of my 39 Chev pickup and hauled them down to my dad's fledgling machine shop in Los Alamos where we were able to re-bore all the bushing bores. So now, with the main crankpins round and the bushing bores round, we were able to fit up the main rods with a much closer fit. We still had no way of re-grinding the 1,2, and 4 crankpins, but at least the rod bushing bores were round. At the same time, we completed a valve motion overhaul and a complete spring rigging overhaul, so by opening day, 1977, the 487 was the Cadillac of the fleet. But for the poor valve timing, which none of us knew how to set at the time, it really did run nicely and was the main workhorse until we got the 488 running a year or two later.
