Member postings for fizzy

I have two of these and only recently have I noticed this problem. You cant move the head as its on a round column and when loose will revolve. I have taken to keeping the bit as close to the work as possible at start up, keeping a slight bite on the quill when lowering and then tighten it back up - not ideal I know.

Making boilers for a living means I sometimes have to bend a lot of copper tube. The small tool above does a very good job but the bigger tool can be a nightmare to get right as the copper wants to crease rather than bend, Buy extra tube and perfect the technique. I measured radius as 1inch to centreline.

**LINK** facebook page. I have used this chaps services and wouldnt hesitate to use him again.

The green seen on bacon is a result of added Nytrogen (injecyed when it is packed to preserve the meat) forming nitrate (Nitrogen and oxygen) and then reacting with the myoglobin on the surfave of the meat. Not all profesional boiler makers know that!.

the cross slide on my L5 bears no relation in terms of scale printed on the dial to what it actually does - its a genuine L5 dial. For 10 thou dialed in it moves just shy of 8 thou. Thankfully I have a good DRO !

Pleased to know that i wasnt the olnly one never to have heard about these. I will be conducting a few trials in the near future to determine flow rates etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycHtWXcaahQ

new to me

Edited By fizzy on 17/01/2022 17:09:05

Edited By fizzy on 17/01/2022 17:10:05

i bought a box today - thanks for the heads up. I will need to blunt them for my use but great price.

which loco is it?

After zooming in I can see them -

Is there a chimney and associated draughting on the 5" boiler - if not then i seriously doubt (infact am certain) that it wont make steam. Scaling it up would just make it worse. No fire tubes, water tubes or cross tubes? I must be missing something - but to answer your original question yes its a simple scale up. As JB has said you might need to look at the flat areas but increasing the thickness will sort that. Ive made lots of 5" and 6" dia verticals and they dont require any stays - but I do work everything out in cad first to ensure I comply with the build codes and safety margins. If you follow the ozzy codes you will comply with the rest of the world. UK codes are fine for UK but lack detail.

For repetative work on the lathe they are invaluable. As stated earlier, I dont know how I ever worked without one. Mine are cheap chinese DROs, 2 axis is under £200, glass scales and repeatable accuracy to a tenth of a thou. Its only when you have a dro that you realise how much unwanted movement can occur when machining what would otherwise be thought of as a solid set up. Definately worth the outlay and you still need a brain to do all the maths.

Until quite recently I used to make my own fireworks, and lots of them. By far the most critical component is charcoal. It had to be air float quality, amything less will render the mix useless apart from making lots of smoke. You can grind it by hand but its very hard work so making it pre industrial revolution must have been very difficult. Its not hard to make a fountain which goes twenty feet in the air but i dont think the neighbours were all that impressed! Making boilers isnt half as much fun.

CUP do a paste but for some reason its not on their website and you need to buy it ib a big tub. I use it as a base and blend it with other fluxes to obtain exactly what I need, sometimes soldering up ten boilers in a day so it needs to be right. If you dont do much silv soldering you can buy solder and flux ready mixed in a paste - its about £15 for 10g in a syringe. loads if you google it.

As far as I am aware Curly didnt leave the drawings to anyone when he died - there is no chain of custody and hence no copyright in existance. Several companies claim to have copyright but in actual fact none can prove it.

My L5 is screw on chuck - be very careful, even hitting the clutch-brake hard can send the chuck spinning off so reversing it is a definate no no.

you can certainly power a six inch boiler with gas - i make my living by doing it! What you cant do is make one big ceramic burner. Such a burner, if made correctly needs a very precise gas velocity and once the diameter goes above about 1.75" this is lost. With no draughting and small bore fire tubes you will be heating the opposing boiler face and not much else which defeats the point of having multiple tubes, as mentioned in my previous response. You need several small burners and their air intake needs an unhindered supply of cool fresh air i.e. not drawing air from inside the boiler shell. If you look at the photos of our 5" vertical boiler on our website **LINK** you will see the air inlet sticking out the side ofthe boiler base, photo 3.

For clarity, brown rusting wont occur without the presence of oxygen (and water for most other types of ferrous rust, ( 4Fe + 3O2 + 6 H2O > 4Fe (OH)3 ( but once it has begun to rust the only way to halt the process is to either completely remove the rusting area or to treat it with a chemical with a lower state of oxidation - the best easily availible such chemical being zinc. Here zinc acts a sacraficial metal and oxidises instead of the metal. Not bad for over 30 years since I last thought about this!

To add my experiences to a question Duncan raises - all of the required air (oxygen) in our burners is mixed outside of the burner adjacent to the tip of the gas jet - dimensions in this area are critical. We add air vents to all of our burners but these are purely to neutralise unwanted harmonics ( there isa lot more to burners than one might expect). When we test our burner design they are run at full throttle into an entirely closed off flue for at least 30 minutes. A cold burner and flue reacts differently to a hot one. The other alternative is to use individual gas jets, lots of them, but your burner would essentially need to be in the open air.

You wont make a single ceramic burner anywhere near big enough to power a 6 inch boiler - trust me, ive spent a lot of time developing our burners. Whilst the burners from FC are great for mamod type boilers they wont burn hot enough for yours, and if you do get them hot enough the ceramic will dissintegrate. There is ceramic and then theres ceramic - you want the stuff Polly models sells. The biggest burner you will be able to make is 2" dia, and at that it will need a baffle plate. Any bigger and the gas mixing goes to pot. To add more misery vertical fire tube boilers dont react well at all to gas burners. They are designed for coal with draughting, not for gas without. I could (and one day might) write a book on burners so I wont go on. Your best route is to make three 1.5 dia burners. On our 5" and 6" horizontal boilers we use 1,5" x 2 and 2" x 2 respectively, but use cross tube flues as you need an easy path for the hot air to move through when non draughted. Best of luck. Nigel @ Pendle Steam Boilers