Member postings for David Taylor

That threw me for a second... I'm in the southern hemisphere!

This seems to be mostly a British preoccupation. Yanks are proud of their hobbies. Us skips don't worry about it. I don't see much media coverage of my hobbies but in the local paper it's always positive. The parents who bring their families to our monthly running days are nothing but positive and always give admiring comments about the locos.

I'm not going to get offended by what some latte slurper or progressive twat thinks until I've seen what they've produced.

I used masonite as a sacrificial top on mine, just screwed on. Seems to work well and was pretty cheap.

When I made my 6 wheel tender with flared top I used a steel bar with the desired radius welded to a flat plate of steel as the former. To do this you'd sit the bar and the plate on a flat surface and weld them such that the plate was sort of tangential to the bar.

The brass was sat upon this, situated so the start of the bend was where the bar joined the plate.

Another flat sheet laid on top of the brass, and everything clamp together. A bit like Julian's solution.

I did anneal the brass. I think I did that when it was already clamped between the two sheets of steel.

Then just tap the brass over the former. Luckily it worked well - I would have been upset after drilling all the rivet holes if I messed up!

The join at the rear corners was tricky, I just kept filing until I had a reasonable fit. I did mess up the rear plate of the tender and had to make another.

Sorry I don't have a photo of it, I borrowed the steel bits off a club member.

That was my immediate question too. I'm not an engineer and even I could wonder at that.

The steampunk crowd would love it, I'm guessing that was the motivation.

Great project!

Given you're controlling the carriage movement you could do multiple start threads by cutting one thread completely and then making an adjustment to the carriage start position to cut the next part of the thread.

I made the oil pots for the tops of the slidebars of the loco I'm building. Was a nice easy job once I had a system worked out.

Very interesting info on the fluidic logic, thanks!

Hi Ron,

A very impressive setup! Those are very big locos.

My father-in-law goes to a place in Qld where the bloke even makes scale bricks to make the buildings with, scale signals, etc.

I doubt our water gets that hot, but our injectors stop working anyway. None of them are lifting injectors, they're all horizontal ones below the footplate so they're also below the level of the tender tank bottom.

We do the same thing leaving the water flowing through the injector the whole time.

Apparently we have a maker of reliable, high quality injectors here in Aus, two of which I have waiting for my NSW mogul. I don't want to try them on my current loco in case they get contaminated somehow!

Hi Ron,

I'm about 4 hours west of Sydney. It has been one of the hottest summers anyone can remember getting up to 40deg C. Even water in tenders gets too hot for the injectors to work reliably. We didn't use ice on the Jan running day and had lots of problems. I was putting my loco back together after a major overhaul leading up to the running day and couldn't get the injectors to work until I fired it up early in the morning before the day heated up, and put fire bricks between the frames and injector bodies. Then they worked okay. I didn't bother putting water in the side tanks of my loco because it's well known that doesn't work well with injectors. I filled them with sand for weight.

During winter it goes from about -4dec C at night to 8-12deg C during the day. Maybe not as cold as the UK, but cold enough! Quite a temperature range around here.

I read a good web page someone wrote about the process he went through making and testing his own injectors, but I don't have his persistence so I'm not sure I'd make a go of it. But he had a means of testing them off the loco which seemed a good idea to eliminate the many parts on the loco which can be at fault.

As far as I can tell they work well until one of a million things upsets them and then you have the joy of cleaning them, checking the pipes, valves, taps, filters, clacks, sacrificing chooks, and who knows what else.

I find them frustrating too. The problem is there is so much that can be wrong - the pipe work, water valves, clack valves, cones - positioning or gunked up, water temperature, pressure range, the list just goes on. It's a wonder the damned things ever work. During the summer months down under its even worse and sometimes if you don't put ice in your tender you're out of luck. Then of course they all have different threads for the connections! I have a pair from somewhere and even the bloke in the club who made a living building and fixing locos didn't have a tap or die they'd match.

My club really frowns upon axle pumps so we all run two injectors. I get the feeling on many locos only one of them works reliably and gets used all the time with the other one only used in emergencies when the 'good' one decides to play up. Way too much of my driving time is spent watching the injector overflow and fiddling with water and steam valves trying to keep water in the boiler.

I can't say I'd blame anyone for fitting either an axle pump or an electric pump as a way of getting water in their boiler, especially with a bypass so you could have a chance at setting it to keep a decent water level most of the time.

It might be a good project to have a testing setup of some sort with a boiler, water tank, and just enough pipe work to test the rotten things.

It seems unless you can make them yourself you'll probably fall foul of them at some point.

Martins solution looks pretty good in this case. You're replacing the whole wall between the two ports. I hope I remember the idea if I ever have the same problem. I very nearly did on my current loco - you can see where the drill went into the port wall but I was lucky enough that it didn't go through.

I taught myself to program back in the early 80s, have always been interested in the lowest level operation of computers, and always worked as a programmer.

And yet not one of my 4 children has shown the slightest inclination to look beyond watching youtube or playing games.

I think their saturation in computers has the opposite effect - to me as a teenager they were new and interesting and thought-provoking. To today's kids they're like a washing machine, VCR, or DVR. There is no real wonder to it.

There will always be people interested in them but I don't think we're ever going to raise a generation who consider coding a normal skill any more than we ever had a generation who could all do plumbing, or design rockets.

I kind of disagree with the user-friendly part too. Writing programs on a BBC micro or Commodore 64 was a lot easier than all the hoops you have to jump through today, whether it be installing an IDE, running a python interpreter or whatever.

There is more info about though, and its a lot easier to get it.

Hi,

I was using phosphoric acid as a pickle for silver soldered steel parts and also to get the mill scale off laser and water jet cut parts. It works really well.

So I have been using it to clean up the inlet and exhaust plumbing for my loco during construction and it seems to clean them up well but I am wondering if anyone knows whether it will harm these metals?

I could get another plastic garbage bin and fill it with citric acid but if I can just use one thing it's easier.

Regards, David.

Thanks for the link! My lathe has the same problem. I'll get some as soon as the seller gets back.

The local guru at my club recommends not lapping the valve and port face but leaving them as machined as long as the finish isn't too rough. He says otherwise they won't seal properly because there is nowhere for oil to hang around in between them.

The story goes when making his first loco (of about 50) he couldn't get the valves to seal no matter how much he polished the faces until his father took pity on him and told him to rough things up a bit which fixed the problem.

Given I have only made my first set of cylinders and valves last year and don't yet have them running I cannot say whether this is a good advice, but he's seen the finish on mine which is far from perfect, and says they should seal fine.

Regards, David.

Hi,

Also look for books by Guy Williams, they are more recent than the Ahern one and have more up-to-date techniques. They are published by Wild Swan.

Also check out rmweb.co.uk. There is a very good scratchbuilding forum there.

Regards, David.

Yes, the trend in language design in the last 10-15 years towards removing type-safety is a really bad idea IMO. The existence of Typescript which tries to add type-safety back into Javascript show at least some people are beginning to understand how dumb this was.

I'm pretty good at code wrangling but I have to say I'm not a C++ fan. I do really like Java though - the best bits of C++ without the horrors. I've been using it since JDK1.0 and I think it's better than any language I used before or since.

Having said that I'm okay with C++ as long as its all mine, like for a microcontroller.

I agree with others that articles about the different types of microcontroller or dev boards are the realm of electronics mags. If there is a workshop project that uses them all well and good, but I don't think MEW is the place for comparisons or articles explicitly about these things.