Thanks but there was no change when I held it down--just let it go for the video clip. No shaking on air. I think the imbalances with all the water flow caused the shaking.
Problem SOLVED. Well turned out to be a perfect storm of a combination of factors. 1) First problem is that the boiler capacity is smaller than I had calculated--yes, I should have measured it directly and now filling to only 75 ml rather than 100, 2) steam leaking from the safety valve gasket and fitting for the steam line. Even a replacement gasket has to be screwed down hard to keep it from leaking; sv itself was fine. This combination resulted in very low pressure in the boiler, and both are now sealed tight with no leaking, 3) wicks on the burner were too high resulting in vigorous and rapid boiling (now trimmed to just a few mm of height. Changing only one or two of these things did not help but by fixing all three, the problem was solved. Thanks everyone for your suggestions and hopefully this will be of help to someone in the future. Watch for a new post with a video of the engine and fountain. Thankfully the engine itself is no longer the fountain.
Congratulations!
I'm delighted to hear that wonderful engine with fountain is going to be just fine. Glad you stuck with it and got to the bottom of all the problems!
Glad you figured It out Brent, over filling the boiler makes a lot of sense now.
Thanks Bruce. It was never clear to me that the boiler was being over-filled, although that was the case, maybe by only a few ccs. But even that wasn't enough as there were other factors involved which made this so puzzling. Video is now posted under the Videos heading.
