Pandrol clips

[Timothy Miller]

Ever forge stuff out of these their 5160 I think and are plentiful along the tracks near my house. http://www.pandrolusa.com/eclip.shtml
They leave the old ones on the ground to rust away.

[CurlyGeorge]

I have seen them before. But never made anything from them. Sounds like some good metal. Let us know how it turns out. :)

[Bad Creek Blacksmith]

They make excellent punches, good hard steel.

[Timothy Miller]

I use them all the time to make tools. They are hard.

[forgemaster]

They hurt when you try to drive them back into a pandrol plate with a sledge hammer but don't make it and they fly out and hit you in the mouth. Good steel otherwise.

Phil

[Timothy Miller]

They hurt when you try to drive them back into a pandrol plate with a sledge hammer but don't make it and they fly out and hit you in the mouth. Good steel otherwise.

Phil

I think if I walked on the RR tracks with a sledge hammer the MTA police would have me in cuffs in short order. I would be on the news doing the perp walk wile they called me a domestic terrorist for tiring to cause a train derailment. I just pilfer the old ones it makes up for the transit tax they imposed last year in a late night unannounced vote.

[forgemaster]

We were a few years ago making/fabricating rail turnouts for underground coal mines. We would fabricate all the rail components, switch blades, frog, check rails then assemble them on a large piece of 16mm MS plate by welding the pandrol plates down then clipping the rails etc to the plates with pandrol clips (obviously) the whole assembly was then delivered to the customer by semi trailer. They then transported the whole turnout underground and usually just dropped it into place and bolted it up. Occassionally they would also cement it in place. It was while clipping the rails into place that we found just how well a pandrol clip can fly. You really had to give the clip one good solid belt to seat it fully into the plate in one go otherwise the clips would just come out as quickly as they were driven in.

We also make a handled punch for the gangs to use to drive the clips out of the sleepers, problems occur when they oxycut the clips off if they are hard to move, then try to use our punches to remove the remains still stuck in the plate. With the end of our punch being heat treated and the end of the clip now flame hardened/heat affected they have had chips fly off and hit blokes in the head and body requireing a trip to hospital and paper work to be filled out. The customer then asked us to anneal the ends of the punch to prevent this happening, problem then was that the punch would then mushroom up and then the gangs would either cut the mushrooming off with the oxy or get them stuck in the plate then cut the punch off with the oxy again. It just became a vicious circle.


Phil