Hot air engines and Boilers

This is my first post to this Forum. I have been a Model Engineer Magazine subscriber for 20 plus years. I am now retired but for the 18 years before retirement I lived and worked in Abu Dhabi. In 2002 or 2003 during a holiday back in England my wife and I went to Harrogate for the weekend and on the Saturday while she was having her hair or nails done I went to W H Smith to stock up on books and magazines to take back to the Middle East and one of these magazines was the Model Engineer issue that introduced the Woodward gearless clock by John Wilding. As there was no wheel cutting involved I could build this with basic equipment. So I bought a Taig lathe from Peatol in kit form without a motor, put it in my suitcase and off I went. I couldn't get a motor at a reasonable price so I bought a cheap waterproof, took the pump off and threw it away and used the motor to run the lathe. A couple of years later my first ever EBay purchase was a Baldor DC motor with a KB controller which is still in use today. As I had to tool up from scratch I decided to go with metric taps and dies rather than BA which is prevalent in Model Engineer clock and steam engine designs. Another project from the magazine that I built, although it involved going round supermarkets with a 6 inch rule was the Robinson candle powered engine. Has anyone out there built one? When I first built it about 7 years ago it would run for 15 or 20 minutes and then stop because I thought the whole thing had heated up and it no longer had a cold end? I have more questions on Model boilers, ut that will have to wait for another day.

Welcome to the forum
:Bump

Robert.

Welcome Kenneth, if you have questions then there will be someone here who will be able to help you ! Noel.

I've done a scaled down version of the Alyn Foundry Robinson Which runs well.

There are several designs for model Robinsons, some use brass for the hotcap which conducts too much heat into the body also having an insulating material between hotcap and body helps be it high temperature O rings or thick hight temp gasket material. Mine has a hotcap cut from cast iron bar and car exhaust gasket as the insulating layer.