Thee promises he’s smiling underneath that respirator. He, John, Jeff, Andre, and Fred B. are all working very hard to prepare for sanding the floor.
Now somehow, Jeff just had to work in some welding! Surrounded by basically an entirely wood car, Jeff was having metal work withdrawals! Five guys with sandpaper and Jeff gets the welder. What he’s doing is preparing the original heater boxes to accept modern internal heat strips. A fair amount of fabrication is required to removed the old ceramic wire wound elements (the ones that when they fail, cause a fire), and upfit the system to contain modern style sealed heater strips. This has been done in the other cars restored here at FRTM and worked well. It allows the original heater box and all its fixtures to be used, but safe new modern internal elements. Best of both worlds!
And since this heater modernization is something we have become quite familiar with, we even have the elements on hand to get job done.
Jeff sure looks happy to be wearing that welding helmet.
And to keep the floor mystery going, we carefully removed checkered flooring to find it was affixed directly to the untreated floor planks. Then at some point the floor was stained. Then of course as the car came to us, it was slathered with brown paint.
Fred Biederman has enough mahogany dust on him to build a board! He had the grueling task of sanding the floors under the railfan seats.
