Roney Oldfield Middleton Double Beam Engine

Hi all, I am not a steam person myself I come from the land of Internal Combustion, however, after seeing the start of a series from Rodney Oldfield building the Middleton Double Beam Engine ME4628 I thought I would give it a go, I have started to gather the materials, however, one part that surprised me was aluminium for the cylinders, really !!!! in an IC engine that would be pluming smoke before you could get back from your next shopping trip, perhaps I am being ignorant here and missing something and as the article says "do your own thing".

Your comments would be welcomed whilst I consider cast iron or stainless steel.

Peter Amateur Radio op' G0KOK, Garage Proprietor Volkswagen Tech' retired.

The original Middleton drawings (sketches) do not give a material for the cylinders but they do say the valve chests are from cast iron and I would have thought that was also the intended material for them. Rodney looks to have used aluminium for the chest and cylinder so that seems to have been his choice as maybe he will only ever run the engine on air. Myself I would cut then from iron bar.

Do be aware that there are a few errors on the drawings, the one for the base plate has been revised in subsequent issues as things were not equal about each engines centre line.

Thanks Jason, I think I will wait until all the sections have been published in subsequent ME editions and make a decision, that way any other mistakes will have been spotted and pointed out, I do have quite a lot of material I can use already.

Peter.

I don't know if there will be any more errors as I only went through the parts covered in the first couple of installments but hopefully there won't be more. Since publication started the sketches have been posted on another site so you could make use of those if you want to get on.

It is also an engine that you could add some more features to to get it looking a bit less like a barstock engine if you wanted such as adding some taper to the columns and detail around the plates, I did not get too far into it. Could even make it a cross compound.

Also it should really be called a double side rod engine rather than double beam, maybe I should start a thread asking for a clear definition between a beam engine and a side rod engine.