You Don't Do This Every Day

[carrdo]

Hi All,

At the limit of what my mill can do.

The boiler is so wide I cannot clamp it directly to the tee slots on the table so I had to think up - construct the custom clamping parts seen in the last photo. It looks simple but it took a week of hard slogging to get to this point.

Do you want to know what I am trying to do?

 

[Darren]

Fishmouth the pipe to fit another pipe? You can download paper templates for that too.

 

[Susquatch]

Do you want to know what I am trying to do?

Collect cow farts? They say they fart enough to run a large scale generator.

Looking closer, I think that thing already has a generator built in.

I wanna watch when you attach one to a cow....

 

[PeterT]

Impressive! Maybe you mentioned already but what model loco does the boiler correspond to?

 

[carrdo]

Hi Peter,

It was fabricated by one of the best live steam boilermakers in the USA, Marty Knox. It is an all welded steel boiler with copper tubes rolled in. I think that only two were ever fabricated by Marty and he doesn't fabricate this type of boiler anymore. It is for a Martin Lewis (Little Engines) Northern in 3/4" scale. This Martin Lewis design goes all the way back to the 1930's. I have all of the drawings which are still available but Little Engines is long out of business so there are no castings available anymore. The boiler was made to current design standards as we have learned a lot of things about the fabrication of live steam model boilers since the 30's especially to build in large corrosion allowances if a model boiler is fabricated from steel (excluding deoxidized stainless steel which is another topic entirely).

 

[carrdo]

Hi All,

To continue.

The front end of the boiler has to have a small circular recess machined into it to fit the connecting ring as seen in photo 614,615 which mates the boiler to the smokebox. As the smokebox needs to be air tight, with no leaks, the two recess' need to be a very precise (tap) fit to achieve this condition. I have already machined the smokebox tube and now need to do the same on the end of the boiler. Easier said than done as I have explained in detail on another web site (chaski.org/home machinist/) in the "Build Log" section.

 

[carrdo]

Hi All,

I had the suggestion (which I agreed with) that I needed to secure the firebox end of the boiler in addition to what I had already made so I quickly came up with the following. Quick and dirty but a very practical solution to have the firebox end well secured.