Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Aye! Since I’m waiting for the ignition and missing pieces, I’ve got plenty of time to puzzle out the rest of it.

Today’s task, building a belt drive for what was an electric water pump.  It’s a cam driven, wobble pump, three rubber chambers and associated check valves, meant as a replacement for a coffee machine.  I figured the low volume, low power requirement pump was perfect as water pump for a 10cc engine, without going overboard.  Some time  ago I gutted a scanner/printer before trashing it. One of the little stepper motors gave it’s shaft and bronze bushings to the water pump belt drive conversion.  I got it framed up in a birch ply cradle before my (legally blind) vision was done for the day.  Plan is to run the pump off the small end of the crank, with tiny  pulleys and 2mm round belt. 

Between that bit and taking my guide dog to the vet, I annealed and sized a brass extension for the straight pipe exhaust, and reconfigured the full inch thick cherry display plank for about the seventeenth time. Gonna go with a linear, diorama style power plant, with a snap in place transmission, and implements stretching it out to about two feet long when running machines, but the core display, with all the essentials, plus a generator and switch box, on a full 1x4x12” cherry plank. Waiting on the ignition, and 7.2v lipo battery pack to finalize the battery/ignition box layout.  The good news is I’ve had plenty of time to shuffle and reconfigure the layout of the engine, generator, water pump, and switch box, while waiting on the rest of the components before finalizing it.  Just tonight I scrapped the square layout for the linear display.  Less busy, easier to see what’s going on for those teaching moments….