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

Thanks for sharing the good and bad details here Daniel, and well done on getting that clevis head properly fixed to the rod.

Do you intend to eventually fix the misaligned holes as well?

Thanks for the pics and the update Daniel.

Thanks for the pictorial update Daniel.

Thanks for the story - the tuning will be closely overviewed
perfect the lapping...

Arnold

Let's call it a day on the valve linkage / steam chest side of this beast, and head back up to the flywheel / crankshaft assembly. With the valve linkage fully disconnected, the noticeable bind in flywheel rotation was still present. So my next move was to disconnect the crank rod from the crank and see how that might be affecting rotation.

Sure enough, rotation smoothed out almost completely with only a slight and fairly even resistance felt through 360 degrees of rotation. Whew!

With just a very slight loosening of the cap screws holding the bearing clamps in place, the flywheel spun easily through several rotations coming to a slow and even stop that bodes well for the shaft and bearings I think. With the bearing clamps in this ever so slightly loosened condition I tried to wiggle the crankshaft and felt no noticeable movement. This seems real good ... perhaps too good to be true?

Along the way, I thought I'd take the time to check for any bend in the crankshaft, with the shaft still cradled in its bearings. So I got out an indicator set-up and with the tip set as close to the hub of the flywheel as I could manage, took a set of rotational readings that gave me less than .002" runout, and some of that could easily be due to old varnished oil, though probably not.

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In any event, it is now apparent that the drag/bind issue was going to be found in the piston/cylinder/crosshead-slide/ linkage system, and not with the crankshaft or bearings ..... again, WHEW!!!

I should add that perhaps surprisingly, the connecting rod's holes at both ends seem fairly well centered, though not perfectly, and both the crosshead-slide and crank arm holes while not too well centered, are both adequately so, as to have plenty of "meat" around them, and should offer no problems. The crank end of the connecting rod has a set of brass bearing inserts that will need some adjustment as there is a little slop on the crank arm bolt (crank pin), and the adjusting screw for that bearing set cannot further tighten, so the edges where the two bearing halves meet will need to be filed back ever so slightly to allow further adjustment range.

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Not a lick of progress on it lately Jim. But I'll certainly have to be getting back to it before too much longer, as it sits on my workbench and takes up entirely too much space! Really can't even reload around it!!!

I had it all apart at one point early on, discovered all of its deep dark secrets (read as problems), made some minor but needful repairs and adjustments, then reassembled just in time to run it a little at the GPU. It needs to be completely disassembled again, and some real work done on it, but in point of fact it does have issues that will preclude it ever being a first class engine, so the motivation is not strong to do too much work on it at this point.

I have been totally occupied with a few other projects, that I should probably do some more documentation on and post up here, but in fact have found little time for adding that documentation project to the other projects list.

There is really a wealth of things I should be sharing here these days, but just can't seem to sit at the computer long enough to do that. I'm always astounded by how some of you folks manage to put up amazing things on what seems a daily basis. If I were trying to do that I'd never get anything else done ..... and believe me, I'm getting little enough done already, without any of the photography, loading and typing to slow me down!  ;c)

Thanks for the update Daniel.

We all know it is in good hands.

Regards,
Charlie