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

Hi Maurice,

A excellent good looking boiler you must be very pleased.  I will be surprised if the ceramic burner doesn't make enough heat to produce a reasonable amount of steam.  I have made a few vertical boilers using ceramic burners and have found that you need quite a lot of combustion space between their top and the tube plate to get the best results.  Most of the boilers were centre flue with either cross tubes or other forms of heat exchangers; the couple of fire tube ones made had a bit of a problem getting the gases to flow through the tubes and were rather smelly, I corrected this by using a fan to start and then either a blower or the engine exhaust to draw the heat.  This worked OK and the smell disappeared.

During Covid I did some experiments with ceramic and mesh burners if you haven't already seen it it might be worth a look:

 

The test boiler is a centre flue and the tube plate has 20 heat exchanging pins, all the burners tested are 28 mm in diameter.

I hope this is found useful.

Take care Tony.