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

This post comes at the end of a long day of working to make the Doll run on steam.

During the first attempt the sight glass broke. After several tries and some burned fingers, I finally made a workable sight glass. Next there was a mini-inferno in the firebox when the alcohol in the original burner expanded and overflowed. After that I used Sterno in an aluminum foil container, and I will only use Sterno going forward. Then, the Doll refused to run on steam. After several hours of adjustments and tries, it ran - not well, but it ran. Hopefully, a little more heat on the boiler will make it run better, but there may be an issue with valve timing due to the eccentrics being worn.

Happy Steaming (Well most of the time.)







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Those mushroom head vaporizing burners can be pretty temperamental, but do work well when they work well.

Hi TraviSteamNThings,

I haven’t belted up the governor yet, but it should be able to run it. It drove my dynamo fairly well when running on air.

Due to piston rod wear, my 365 seeps a bit where those rods enter the cylinders. After running awhile, oily water does accumulate on the base below the piston rods. You can see this seepage in the closeup YouTube video a couple of posts above and compare it to your engine. It’s too bad these engines don’t have replaceable packing where the piston rods enter the cylinders.

Overall, due to wear, my Doll isn’t a super lively runner. I guess that’s to be expected for an engine that’s nearly 100 years old.

Good luck with that Doll, and Happy Steaming.

Darryl

A bit more work on the Doll after taking a break. Since the boiler had to come off for repair, it made sense to change the color of the base from machinery grey with sharpie penstripes to a more original green with painted pinstripes. The straight striping was laid down with a Beugler pinstriping tool, and the curves were masked and painted with a brush. Not a perfect job by any means, but better than before. I intended to paint a light green stripe inside of the red one, but I’m gonna stop while I’m ahead.

Now on to the boiler repair.



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Pinstripes - Part 2

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