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Cowan Railroad Museum

Cowan Railroad Museum, Cowan, Tn

After scouting Iron Gap Road, we stopped for brief tour of the outdoor exhibits at the Cowan Rail road museum. It was near dark and the museum was closed, but it was still fun to get out and walk around the old trains and climb on the steam engine.

Cowan is the place where the railroad begins it climb over Mont Eagle mountain. Even with a tunnel through part of the mountain, it is so steep that they have to add extra engines to make the climb. Cowan is where they store the pushes and hook them up for the climb to the top of the rock.

The museum is located right on the main road in downtown Cowan, right beside the rail road tracks. No trains came by while we were there however.

At one time it was possible to take a Jeep to the tunnel entrance. But, since it is on CSX property, I doubt that you can safely make the run anymore.

Across the street, there is a Texaco station with a couple of antique cars visible inside. The museum is open May through October, so we will have to return when it is open and check out the inside.

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Abandoned McDonald Elementary School

Abandoned McDonald Elementary School

A tour of the abandoned elementary school in McDonald, Tn

Jennifer arranged for us to tour the old school building in McDonald. This is the school where she received some of her early education. It was abandoned years ago when the boiler failed and is scheduled for demolition.

Many memories haut the hallways. The school was abandoned abruptly in mid year and students were displaced to Black Fox and Prospect elementary schools. The school has most recently been used as a community center, but with no electricity and no running water, there has not been much use made of the building.

The roof has not been maintained and with no heat, the structure has begun to severely decay. The once beautiful hardwood floors in the hallway have buckled and the doors are falling off their hinges. Paint is peeling and the ceilings are falling in. Most of the windows are broken.

Many odd reviewers of the bright days of elementary school remain however. The paintings of Charlie Brown and Lucy marking the boys and girls restrooms are still colorful. The fact that the restrooms are in the basement with and can only be accessed by stairs may be clues to why the building was abandoned.

The old cafeteria, also located in the basement, was littered with an odd collection of tables, chairs yard sale remnants and weird cans of processed food. There was a very nice industrial refrigerator there in the midst of the junk however.

Many of the paintings on the walls of the classrooms survive. There is a train representing the moths of the year in one room and a row of apples lining another room. In one pile of books, Jennifer actually found one of her old school books. It had her name still listed in the front of the book when it was assigned to her.

One room has a unique feature. It has an elevated section with a tree mural painted on it. It was called the tree house. The fifth graders could climb a ladder and sit there and read.

The auditorium seemed the best preserved room. The stage was still in good shape and less debris cluttered the room.

At some point someone, I hear it was the Ruratain club, spent a lot of money to add electrical wiring to the building. Apparently the project was never finished as there are big empty breaker boxes hanging on many of the walls. The electricians made no effort what so ever to make the installation look nice however. There is ugly PVC conduit exposed on the walls and the holes where the came through the walls are ragged and unfinished. In some ways it looks like they had to have worked extra hard to make the conduit runs so ugly.

In the basement there is a huge Ronan switching panel connected to the large emergency generator outside. It looks like they were well prepared for an extended outage.

Outside, the playground is nothing more than an asphalt pad. There is a set of monkey bars in the woods surrounded by briars.

The gym is a huge metal building obviously built much later. It appears to be in good shape. However there is an odd drainage problem apparent wilt the building. The grade slopes toward the front where there is a huge sidewalk. There is no provision made for the water to drain under the sidewalk so it just dams up there in a heavy rain. There is evidence that the water collects several inches deep at the corner of the building. The side panels are rusted and there are stories of water entering the building. I can’t imagine what the builders were thinking.

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Iron Gap Road Scouting Trip

Places to Ride in Tennessee

We read on a few internet forums about a road called Iron Gap road. We finally found it on the map and saw it was between Cowan and Winchester. There are a lot of interesting things to see in that area so we thought we would make a scouting run before loading up the Jeep on the trailer and making a full scale assault.

We got to Iron Gap by taking the road through Cowan and then taking the new 64 bypass just outside of Winchester. We then took HWY 16 due south to the top of the mountain.

Just at the top there is a fire tower visible. We turned there and hit Iron Gap road beside the Keith Springs Community Center. We saw some trailers parked there so our plan is to park ours there when we return.

The road starts out paved. But just before you get to a nice farm house, the road veers right and becomes unpaved. There is evidence of an old gate here. The trail starts out as a nice unpaved road with a few shallow mud holes. Janice drove her stock XJ while Jennifer navigated. I sat in the back.

The road followed the ridge for about three miles. Then as it started down the mountain, it stared to get a bit rockier. I got out a spotted Janice as she drove over some of the smaller rocks. As we neared the valley floor, the rocks got bigger and the hill got steeper. After walking a particularly tricky section, I decide that we should turn around. If we had had another Jeep with us or some recovery gear I might have tried it, but it looked too risky to try coming back up alone.

Janice was tired from the drive over and the bumpy ride in so I turned her Jeep around and headed back up the hill. We posed for a few pictures on the small stair case climbs. It definitely looks like a place we will have to return to with the off road Jeeps.

Back on the pavement, I had hoped to return to Cowan via the Turnpike road. We found what I think was the road, but it was marked private by a hunting club. So, we elected not to risk it and headed back to Cowan the way we came.

We stopped for a quick tour for the train Museum and to check out the old cars in the Texaco across the street. We then headed up the mountain to climb the overlook rock near Sewanee just at sunset. Since Jennifer had never seen the campus at University of the South, we made a small detour through the campus. She did not see much in the dark however; just enough to want to come back.

UPDATE: Return to Iron Gap

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Exhaust Manifold Replacement Jeep Cherokee

Exhaust Manifold Replacement Jeep Cherokee

After removing the old manifold and finding it too broken to repair, I ordered another one form my parts supplier Crown Automotive. I get great service from Crown and they supply quality parts. Their parts are near duplicates of the original Jeep parts and I can order with the Jeep part number.

I received my boxes early in the morning. However, one of the boxes was crushed. The box with the gasket was damaged as were the main manifold gasket and the air filter I had ordered. The doughnut gasket was fine as were some of the other parts in the box. I returned the damaged parts.

I compared the manifold to the original just to make sure it looked the same. It seemed well made but with some kinda sloppy welds. Just like the original.

I began by installing the EGR pipe in the new manifold. I had to heat the old manifold to get the EGR pipe out and the fitting at the end still did not want to swivel. I screwed it in the manifold and lined it up with where it would need to point to attach to the intake.

I cleaned off the head using a Scotch Brite wheel mounted in my drill. Luckily I had a spare gasket so I installed that. I then mounted the new manifold. It is way easier to get to the mounting bolts with the intake out of the way.

I then cleaned up the manifold mounting surface and sat it in place. Since it is very hard to get the bottom manifold bolts started, I tried setting them in place and loose hoping I could slip the manifold in behind the thick washers. I forgot about the dowels that the manifold has to slip over. So, I had to pull the manifold back out and pull the bolts.

Once the manifold was seated into place, I began the tedious task of getting all the bolts lined up and started into their threaded holes. The ones on the bottom were very hard for me. Once I finally got them all in I remembered to finish hooking up the EGR line. I had slipped the tube into the hole as I set the manifold in place but not started the nut.

I tried every possible angle and I could not get the nut to start. It would go in a thread or so and then pop back out. I tried from above and below. The tube looked aligned but it was obviously just a hair off. And with it seized in the exhaust I could not move it much to try to align it.

After struggling for an hour or so, I gave up and pulled both manifold back out. I found I could easily thread the pipe in with the manifold laying on the floor. I hoped that if the exhaust end freed up that I could attach it in place in the truck. So, I heated the nut cherry read and sprayed AFT on it until I could spin it around on the tube. I bolted the exhaust back in place and tried again. I tried it with the nut started in the intake but then it would not thread in the exhaust. I tried it with the nut started I the exhaust and it would not start in the intake. I wiggled the intake around every way I could but I could never get the nut to start.

So I took both manifolds off again. While I had the exhaust out this time I decided to remove the air warming tube because I don’t use it and it is really in the way for getting to the bottom bolts. I laid the manifolds on the floor and hooked up both tubes. I tightened the nuts almost snug but where the tube would still move a bit.

I then set the entire assembly in place as a unit just like I had taken it out. Putting the back nut on the exhaust mounting stud was a real struggle that involved some yelling and throwing wrenches before I finally worked my hand into the correct position. Eventually I was able to get all the bolts started into their threaded holes. I snugged up the EGR tube nuts and hooked up the down pipe to the new manifold.

I was tired and sore by that time so I called it a night and I will finish tightening the bolts later. Then I will have to hook back up all the vacuum and electrical connectors.
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Broken Exhaust Manifold Jeep 4.0

Broken Exhaust Manifold Jeep 4.0

I have been hearing an exhaust leak in my off road Jeep Cherokee for a couple of years. Knowing that the 4.0 manifold is likely to crack, I did not think much about it. However, the noise has been getting worse and I am starting to see some indication that the leak was causing some cooling problems under the hood.

So, I decided to take a look to see how bad the crack was. I began by using a mirror and a flashlight. I pulled the air box to get more room. I was able to look over the front four runners pretty well and found no visible cracks. I know that the later HO manifolds tend to crack where the two section join. But this is the older style manifold that has one main tube and the runners are welded to it. No matter how I twisted the mirror, I could not see the back two runners.

So I decided to pull the intake and take a look. In some ways the old Renix manifold is easier to remove and in some ways it is not. One of the things that makes it easier is that the whole injector wiring harness can simply be unbolted at the firewall and stay with the manifold. There is no need to disconnect the individual injectors.

I did have to disconnect the three sensors below the engine. The O2 sensor, the block temperature sensor and the knock sensor all had to be disconnected to let the wiring harness stay with the manifold.

I had to remove the power steering pump from the bracket to access the bolt that holds the bracket to the manifold. Then I removed the fuel and vacuum lines. I was not able to get the EGR line to break loose so I had to remove the intake and exhaust manifolds as a unit.

Once I had them out and on the shop floor, I was able to get the EGR line to break free from the intake. I immediately saw severe cracking on the last runner near the O2 sensor bung.

I flipped the manifold over and saw cracking around the number five runner as well. I pulled on the pipe sand the last two runners separated completely from the manifold.

I had planned to re-weld the cracks but after seeing how broken up the pipes were and how brittle the surrounding metal was, I decided to order a replacement. I looked into getting a header but there are few to choose from for the older engine. I also thought about retrofitting the HO manifold but that would have meant redoing the down pipe back to the catalytic converter. I decided to simply replace it with a stock type manifold from Crown.