Esso 1855 Tank lifted with CAKE!

We made good progress on the Esso 1855 tank wagon. As you may know, the wagon’s saddle no longer exists, so the tank was sitting on the chassis. We raised the tank away from the chassis for the first time in years.

We had challenges and some limited resources, but the goal of lifting the tank has been one we have been planning for over the last few weeks. We had conducted tests and got the opinions of many people. We are very grateful to all who offered their thoughts; it all helped.

We moved one end so far as an initial test working slowly, but the tank separated from the chassis using nothing more than CAKE!

CAKE: Coupling Accessory for Kinetic Elevation

_{(Can you tell one of us is a NASA fan?)}

We have some explaining to do in a more detailed video, but because we didn’t want to move the drawbar, we needed to navigate around the drawbar. This is where we turned to CAKE.

The CAKE allows us to raise the tank by directing the force around the drawbar. We evaluated many options when lifting the tank and recognised that this isn’t the best way to do it.

We had bottle jacks, and a solid base to push from (railway sleepers, rail). We just had to navigate our forces around the tank.

The first step was to create a flat base to push on. I used a segment of wood to create the radius of the tank and then fixed that in place with some contact adhesive (I’ll worry about the removal later!), and that gave me this:

I could then use that to interface CAKE with the tank:

The bottle jack would do the lifting, but the CAKE adapter would direct that force around the drawbar and push from the bottom, and it worked perfectly! We moved little by little and reset the jack frequently.

The bolts going through the two vertical pieces allow us to remove CAKE but also provide some prevention to the tank wanting to push those 2 bits outwards.

Here is a brief video showing some close-ups of the tank separating from the chassis. You can see that it comes away slowly, you can also see the cleaning up we have to do!

All in all, this was quite a big challenge, and it was a jump forward. This means we can now complete raising the tank. That will give us more work space to attend to the chassis and prepare for the new saddle. We need to remove the sheet metal the tank has been sitting on as that is no longer fit for purpose.

Until next time!

Adam