After I unloaded the DR650 with Ural sidecar, the box looked like this

Phelonius

EJID wrote on 10/28/10 at 15:05:47:


Piece of cake.  Did it alone.  I am a retired chief boatswains mate, I know which end of a rope to pull.

Now another expirement.

 
 

This is one of my brain farts.  A chunk of scrap steel and some brass, aluminum, and bronze from which I cut away everything that did not resemble a steam engine. No plans, no sketches.
It ran perfectly on the first try.

Phelonius

verslagen1 wrote on 10/28/10 at 17:45:50:


I plead ignorance, what is a scottish joke?

Phelonius

Phelonius,do you use compressed air to run it ? or do you have a boiler hidden away. A very nice job were you able to take tour lathe with you to the Island, My dad made a single cylinder one I think it was called an occle or something like that, But he had a instruction book, very small,the whole thing could fit in the palm of my hand.
How long did that one take to make Phelonius ?
A definate work of art,you should be proud.

I should have brought the lathe with me but I sold thinking it would be easier just to replace. Wrong!  Now that I am here I am finding that some companies won't even ship here because of some claimed complications.
The ones that will have exorbitant shipping charges. I would have been better off to do without something else and bring the lathe. Almost nobody on this island has a hobby lathe for metal.
I just ordered a smaller one that should be here in about a month.  With shipping charges and all it has cost me more than a grand just to get a hobby sized lathe here.  But it should help keep me entertained on rainy days.
That engine is a double acting (pistons are powered going both ways) two cylinder with sliding valves like a train locomotive engine ( it even sounds like one). There are 4 power strokes for every revolution of the crank. This means that it is not needed to give it a spin to start up.  Just open the valve and it goes.  What ever position the crank is in, one of the pistons is in a power cycle always.
Years ago I was in the museum of science and industry in Chicago. They had a great display of steam engines, some with cut open sections showing how they worked.
I just made this by making one part at a time and fitting it.
I knew the block had to have cylinder holes and that the piston rods had to move in a straight line, so I milled the block for trunions and and line bored the cylinders and fitted one end of the cylinders with bronze bushings for the piston rods.  Then I made the trunions and fitted them using the cylinders and rod bushings as a guide to bore the trunions for threading them so that the rods could be attached.
Then I made the pistons to thread onto the rods and the rods thread into the trunions. I one of the photos you can see a loop of brass rod fitted to two small holes in the piston head. This is the wrench that does the job of assembly.
The crankshaft was lathed from one solid bar of bronze so that the two crank throws were 90 degrees apart. This gives it the 4 power strokes per revolution.
Now with the crank fitted and the pistons fitted and the rods and trunions in place, I could measure and machine the conrods.
Then I had to think about the way the valves would shunt pressure to the cylinders so that on a power stroke, pressure went into the cylinder and pushed on one side of the piston. When the piston had traveled the correct distance, that valve had to reverse the flow so that that passageway became an exhaust port while pressure was shunted to the other side of the piston.  I had to construct a double acting valve for each piston and manifold them together so that they worked in synch.
Then I milled operating rods similar to con rods that would move the valves.  These rode on a large bronze disc with an eccentric hole for the crankshaft. They were then drilled and tapped for a set screw that allowed me to time the valve and lock it in time. This device is the cam.
Add on a small globe valve to turn it on or off and it was done.
Of course there were a slew of small oil passages and such but I won't bore you with that. Since I didn't have a boiler yet, I hooked it to my compressed air supply and opened the valve. It ran on the first try.
Like I said, just cut away everything that doesn't look like a steam engine and it will work.
If somebody can tell me how to post a short video of my own, using a Macbook laptop, I will post a video of it running.
I already have such a video in my bikepics account. How do I et it here?

Phelonius

Bringing a trade into the relm of art. Bravo!!!