“Russian?”
“Yes. The family’s original paternal name was Adamski. My grandfather shortened it to Adams when he became a naturalized citizen. His parents—my great-grandparents—escaped the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war by traveling across Siberia to the city of Harbin, where there was a large Russian colony. My great-grandfather worked there for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.”
Malorie seemed fascinated. “Tell me more.”
“Okay, here’s the condensed version of how my folks got to the States: Both of my grandparents on my father’s side grew up in Harbin and came to the States separately. My grandmother left Harbin for Seattle to attend the University of Washington before World War II. After my grandfather got a master’s degree in electrical engineering in Harbin he went to Shanghai and somehow got a job in Australia, where he worked at the Mount Isa mine, with the ultimate goal of coming to the United States to marry my grandmother. He was in Sydney for the weekend when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, he went to the U.S. embassy to try to join the U.S. Navy. But when he was there, he ran into a Merchant Marine captain who needed someone to fix a turbine since his ship’s engineer was in the hospital with a hot appendix. My grandfather fixed the turbine and stayed on the ship, leaving all of his clothes and books behind in Mount Isa. He spent the rest of the war in the Merchant Marines.”
Phil continued, “While he was on leave on the West Coast in 1945 he married my grandmother. Then, years later when they were established in California, they ransomed my great-grandparents from the communists and brought them to the States, so my dad got to grow up with both sets of his grandparents living in a cottage on the San Francisco peninsula. So a lot of my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s personalities rubbed off on my dad, which then rubbed off on me. The last of my grandparents died when I was ten years old, but a lot of their stories are quite well remembered, and a lot of their attitudes are firmly entrenched in me. They had a strong Christian faith and a deep distrust of totalitarianism—and, in fact, of most other ‘isms.’”
On Malorie’s third day at the ranch, it was wash day. Ray went out to start the Lister generator set, but it wasn’t long before he shut it back down and came into the house, looking glum. He kicked off his mud boots and walked to the kitchen table. He said, “We have a problem, ladies and gents: The engine is turning just fine, but the generator is not.”
“Uh-oh,” Alan said.
Alan, Phil, Malorie, and Ray all walked out to the generator shed together. Ray brought a rag and a flashlight.
Examining the generator set, they could see nothing outwardly wrong, other than its usual small and chronic oil leaks. It was Malorie who spotted some metal filings beneath the coupling that joined the engine shaft to the generator shaft. “Hey, look here: Looks like it ate a Woodruff.”
Phil, who only had rudimentary mechanical knowledge, asked, “What’s that?”
Malorie pointed the tips of her index fingers together to illustrate. “The two shafts come together end to end, like this. A Woodruff spline keeps them aligned, and this coupling sleeve holds the spline in place, and the coupling is in turn held in place with these big Allen-head screws.”
After a pause, she went on. “I’ll need a set of Allen wrenches—they look like three-sixteenths—but it could be a size smaller or larger, or possibly even metric. Oh, and I’ll also need some sort of degreaser, preferably in a spray can.”
Ray nodded. “The Allen wrench you need is right here.” He pointed to a wooden tray of maintenance tools that had been power-screwed to the wall of the shed.
Alan offered, “I used to have to tighten those Allen screws once every few months, but then I got wise and stared using green Loctite so that they don’t drift.”
“I’ll be right back with a spray can of carburetor cleaner,” Ray said.
While Phil held the flashlight, Malorie deftly loosened the Allen screws. Just as Ray stepped back into the shed with a spray can, Malorie slid the sleeve aside and chuckled.
She said, “I knew this thing was old, but I didn’t know it was this old. This thing is pre-Woodruff.”
“Meaning what, Mal?” Ray asked.
“Meaning it is not a square Woodruff key that got eaten. It’s a taper key, which is what they used before Woodruffs became commonplace. That means that finding or making a replacement key will be a lot more difficult.”
She went on to explain. “The good news is that keys are made from mild steel, with parallel sides and base. The top face of the key has a slight taper of just a one- or two-in-a-hundred ratio, which allows you to fit it into a keyway, followed by a rapid take-up of the slack in the hole, by the taper.”
“So you’re saying that you have to fabricate a replacement for a part that you’ve never seen, because we only have a few fragments,” Ray said.
“That’s right. I don’t suppose you have a dial micrometer?”
“No,” Alan answered glumly.
“But I’ll bet the Leaman ranch has one that we can borrow,” Ray offered.
Mal looked up. “Also ask if they have a tube of some machinist’s Prussian blue. It’s also called blue dykem.”
Ninety minutes later, Ray roared back to the ranch on his KLR motorcycle. He shouted, “Got ’em!”
After spraying all of the parts with degreaser, Malorie used the projecting tips of the calipers to measure the keyways on the shafts and coupling in several places, and took notes.
“Not only do I have to account for some taper, but the keyway also shows some wear, even though it was obviously harder steel than the spline. So to compensate, I’m going to have to taper the new key in two different axes.”
She made the new taper key from a standard seven-sixteenths-inch threaded steel bolt. She wisely left the head of the bolt in place for most of the steps so that she’d have that to clamp firmly into Alan’s bench vise. An Aladdin mantle lap was fetched and set up for light to work by.
Malorie explained as she started: “Normally I’d use a milling machine or even just an abrasive cutoff wheel to work this down to the rough dimension, but of course we’re without power, so we’ll use the old-fashioned method. Namely, hand files and plenty of sweat.”
The four of them took turns filing flats on four sides of the bolt shaft. After one hour and fifteen minutes, they were close to the requisite rough dimensions, and Malorie started measuring with the calipers more and more frequently. After nearly two hours of work, Malorie was doing all of the filing and all of the calipering as the three men stood back and watched. She let the work piece cool for a few minutes as she took a sip of water. Then she loosened the vise and dropped the workpiece into a rag.
“Time for a sanity check,” she declared.
After carrying the roughed taper key and the “mike” to the generator shed, she did a test fitting. She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure that I was visualizing the taper correctly in both axes.”
After taking another measurement, she carried her work back to the vise in Alan’s shop.