Member postings for Simon Collier

Copper wedge type or electric? I have an 80 W iron for lead lighting. I am using my Benzomatic MAPP gas torch turned as low as it will go. You can turn it upside down, unlike my small Primus propane cylinder. There is a big mass of brass now.

I have been making my tender kit for my Springbok which I bought years ago from Model Engineer's Laser. I am finding it very difficult despite the supposedly easy tab and slot construction. I have not made brass fabrications before so have no specific experience. Soft soldering is horrible. Give me a boiler and some Easyflow anyday! Even when heating a small area and not being at all greedy, the panels buckle and bend, with the soft solder grabbing once the piece is out of position! So I am now using a lot more screws and angle than I had hoped, and clamping flat bars across panels where possible before soldering a section. Cleaning up will be a hell of a job, I have a lot of screw heads to Dremel off, and car body filler will be required! It is a shame there is not a constructional video on the MEL website. I can't find any instructions at all in fact on the site.

A friend who is very experienced ended up cutting off the tabs on his Maisie tender kit and using angle in the traditional way after becoming frustrated with the kit.

I don’t think people write by hand anymore. The only time I write these days is taking notes at club meetings as secretary, when I use a fountain pen. Parker Duofold. Otherwise everything is keys on phone or computer.

Same variety of potatoes and a type suitable for roasting? Pre- heat oven properly? Metal dish. Good amount of oil/fat. Pretty hot, maybe 210-220. Baste and turn once or twice. For a crispier but soft spud, par boil till surface starts to flake.

If Redsetter wishes to be offensive, perhaps he might use his real name. No profile either, I note. Julian may not be quite a deity, but he is vastly experienced, and if asked, extremely helpful. I share his enthusiasm for good front end design, superheating, and valve gear that allows one to drive on the reverser.

Alas, JAS's proposed experiment will never happen. Soon though, I will be able to compare directly a well made saturated Blowfly with a well made one with only two copper elements. I provided the latter's boiler with 2 x 3/4" flues which replaced two 1/2" firetubes. It was run for some months with copper twists in the flues, then the superheaters were added. The difference was amazing.

It is easy to convince oneself that something doesn't make much difference if you are not willing, or not capable of making it. Hardly an objective opinion. So who here used to superheat their engines and now don't bother because they don't think it makes any difference?

How you use the engine is important too. Anything will putter round light engine. On the busiest days, our club gives 1000 rides an hour. One Saturday I drove my Simplex with a heavily loaded 6 car train plus guard's van, with a larger engine leading, for over 3 hours without a break. When pulling up the long 1 in 60 you need everything going for you.

To the OP I would add only that I sand the stainless tube end with wet&dry or similar to take the surface oxide off and instantly paint with HT flux.

I totally agree with Julian and David.

You can talk about all the theory in the world or, you can drive a saturated loco, add superheaters, and drive it again. That will be all the convincing you will need. The smaller the loco, the more important superheating, or steam drying if you like, is. The improvement between saturated, and copper elements withing the flues, is greater than the improvement going from copper to radiant stainless elements, but the latter are the best.

I have had a lot of frustration making clacks. One tip I read in a Kozo book recently is to have the seat at 15 degrees and tap the ball only hard enough to make a small ring. He reasons that the smaller the seat ring the more pressure per unit area to seal it. I am yet to try it. Viton balls work well using one size smaller hole with a slight chamfer on it so as not to cut the ball. Steam Fittings valves work well they use a little plunger and o-ring instead of a ball however they leak when steaming up until you have raised some pressure to seal them as the plungers are light.

Friends are using Viton O-rings with success but you have to get the squeeze right. Not too much.

Rolling plate is essential if you want a tapered barrel or if you can't obtain the size tube you want. Obviously using tube is easier. When rolling and joining with a butt strap, the required size of strap and spacing of rivets are specified in the Australian code.

Great photo, Jason.

Being simple is the only advantage. It gives very poor valve events. It was studied in detail and compared to other gears in EIM by Simon Bowditch ?? A few years ago. Also it only fits locos with enough vertical clearance for the rods, eg those with high set boilers.

Coincidentally, I just finished upgrading my ML-7 stand yesterday. It is a recycled barbecue trolley with a bit of ply plus a bit of kitchen bench top. I added two extra legs and some bracing. The switch was from ebay and thanks to Warwick Allison for wiring it to the motor for me. You can tell it is just finished as it is so clean! It is all pretty rigid and flat, plenty good enough for a little lathe.

I seriously considered making a dough hook for my mill. Even expensive kitchen mixers aren't really man enough for the job.

You are already doing one of the things you need to do, reading magazines. The other is to join a club and be advised by the members. Don't be in a rush to start a loco. You need to decide whether to build something simple, or something you like. I remember the day I walked into the local club and asked the first group of blokes I saw how you build a loco. I didn't have a clue, but they were very helpful and friendly.

I don't think it is possible. Consider cutting through the tube at 45 degrees and silver soldering back together in a 90 degree bend with zero radius. It is quite easy. To get tight bends, I part a deep groove in a bit of bar wide enough such that the tube barely can be pushed into the groove and bent around whatever radius the i.d. of the groove is. The tight fit prevents the tube from flattening and kinking.

Your requirements are incompatible with your budget, not a rare phenomenon! A C3 type lathe can be made to perform OK. Consider Neil's book on the C3 mini lathe, and have a look at the article on setting up one of these lathes on the Arc Euro site.

I have dropped EIM as they don't bother to remind me that my subscription is ending so it runs out. This time I am not renewing as it has gone downhill also. I am delighted to see Graham Meek's article on the ML-7 screwcutting clutch in MEW as he usually publishes his excellent stuff in EIM.

Every time I get annoyed with magazine content I remind myself that the editors can only publish what they get. I have no interest in 3D printing, CNC machining, and get very annoyed with articles on irrelevant stuff like workshop storage or lighting. But interests change too. I used to hate the dominance of articles on Myford lathes and accessories, thinking them to be over-priced, under-performing, obsolete little machines. Now I have an ML-7, as it fell into my lap for peanuts, I have gone back through the magazines and read everything on them. I'd hate to actually have to use it as my lathe though.

I think beginners would do better with books, u-tube and assistance from friends/club members, and I am surprised Neil gets many requests for these articles.

Thanks Julian. I wish I knew about the blow down holes in the frames being in the wrong place! I had to make ugly circular extensions to the rectangular holes to accommodate the valves. Clearly Martin Evans did not make a Springbok. In fact, I am informed with some authority that the first Springbok made was actually made here, in Australia but I can't remember the builders name. I would love confirmation of this, if anyone knows. Another problem I did not know about is that the bogie wheels hit the front cylinder covers on a modest curves. This happened on my test run on our largest radius track, and apart from trying stiffer side control springs, I don't know what to do about it.

Some of the changes I was forced to make I was worried would lower performance. The firebox is narrower, because of our 4-9/16 back to back wheel standard and also because of the 4 mm frames I used. I dropped the number of firetubes to from 18 to 16 because 18 did not really fit, with our AMBSC requirement for 3 mm ligaments in the tubeplates (proved unnecessary by Alan Wallace in a scholarly article in AME). Also due to the availability of 1-3/4 clip-lock rings, I increased cylinder bore to this from 1-11/16. The valves also have clip-lock rings. These excellent rings were used in truck transmissions, but no longer, so they are now almost unobtainable.

The valve gear was designed using the Wallace simulator with Don's help. Then the rods and links were cut out to these numbers (rods laser cut, expansion links wire cut. I hacked out one connecting rod just to feel honest!). The valves were then timed by putting them where the simulator said they should be when the piston was in a particular position, e.g., in full gear with the valve measured to be moving the specified 0.685" with a dial indicator, the back port was set to open to exhaust when the cylinder had traveled 92.3% of its travel (measured with a depth gauge). The valves are not set to equal leads, as that did not give the best events with the changed dimensions.

I think you start thinking about the first drive as soon as you have a rolling chassis. I've seen several first drives where the engine has limped back to loco with problems: an eccentric/return crank slipped; a pin fell out; there was a significant steam leak; the valve timing was atrocious etc.. Mine was supremely satisfying because it went so well. The only problem was that one of the lubricators grub screw had slipped (Steam Fittings commercial one) so it wasn't pumping, but I had piped up such that both lubricators went to both cylinders for just such an eventuality.

The journey has sometimes been satisfying and enjoyable, and sometimes frustration and exhausting. Plenty to go but all downhill from here. The tender chassis is made so it will be cab and tender tank now.

Yesterday I took my unfinished Springbok to the club and steamed it for the first time, with a temporary water feed to an injector from my riding truck. This is my first engine, but along the way I finished about 3/5 ths of a Blowfly for a young friend, and there were many other distractions. See my profile for a bit more of the story. The engine ran very well indeed and far exceeded my most optimistic expectations. The injector worked reliably and it was very easy to drive. Although only running light and slow, to run in, it used amazingly little fuel and water, greatly helped, no doubt, by 4 radiant superheaters. It needed no blower, and the pressure remained stable. I am absolutely delighted with it. Thanks to Julian for calculating the front end dimensions I used, and to Don Aston for helping me to modify the valve gear. I wanted to get rid of the 26 thou lead, and lengthen the expansion link to get about 75% cut off in full gear. James Sanders made this video:

**LINK**