Boiler Gauge Glass

We decided to make the sight glass for the boiler following John King’s design, with slight modifications. Ian Cross of the SBA was very helpful and modified some existing patterns he had for “normal” reflex gauge glasses to suite rear-entry installations, and had 3 sets of these cast for our “boiler making syndicate”.

As it happened he made the castings with larger/longer mounting “lugs” so I decided to try to make the gauge with the cocks integrated into the body (as opposed to separate valves as drawn by John). This was a quite stressful decision as the cocks are not easy to make, and any errors result in a scrapped casting, but none-the-less I am quite pleased with the result.

The design is unusual as the lower cock is made as a three-way cock to allow the two cocks to be set for normal operation, isolation of the glass (in the event of failure of the glass) and to allow blow-down of the glass and drum – a neat and innovative solution.

Manufacture

The manufacture was quite simple:

• • The flat faces of the casting were all faced on the shaper (using stop-pins) to hold it to the shaper table. This approach allows the complete faces to be machined in one pass.

• • 

    Milling the Glass Recess

    The body and cover castings were then attached to the mill table and the recesses were cut for the glass (a B2 Klinger Reflex Glass from Heritage Steam Supplies).

  • At the same time the holes (ports) to connect the drum to the gauge glass space were drilled. This required some careful measurement as I made my usual mistake of not really understanding how the gauge fitted into the casting (it’s a bit like the sculptor finding the subject hidden in the stone) and so had not realised that the pre-cast slot for the glass was not actually arranged to be at the longitudinal centre of the casting – so the ports to the glass slot had to be offset from the threaded holes for mounting the gauge. As all these holes had to also mate with the taper cocks taper part it needed to be done carefully.
  • The next process was to drill and bore the holes for the taper cocks. Firstly, the cocks themselves have to be turned with the correct taper – the important thing is that the cocks and the holes are turned at exactly the same setting, so one sets the top-slide to the 10-degree angle and then locked in place while both parts are made. Here are some pictures of the parts and video of setting up for the the boring using a sharpened rod (located in a dot-punched mark at the centre and a closed up tailstock chuck, which provides a female centre point) and dial gauge to get the casting correctly positioned on the face-plate. This is a very off-set operation so large amounts of junk have to be bolted to the face-plate to attempt to balance everything.

• 

  Boring the drain port

  The last operation is to drill and centre-bore the drain hole from the bottom of the casting to the taper-cock bore. This needed to be accurate, so I drew it up in ViaCad to ensure I had accurate dimensions and angles. Then a digital angle gauge allowed the head on the Rambaudi Mill to be set over to drill the hole (rather a “tall” set-up).

• The final assembly showed that the handles on the cocks clashed with the dome nuts on the steam drum ends, this could probably have been avoided by shortening the shafts of the cocks, but this would have required bent handles (as described in the drawings) but I did not have any suitable material. So I made two spacers to lift the gauge clear of the end-plate. these have o-rings installed on both sides to seal the assembly.

Boiler Fittings

The next stage of the process is to attach all the boiler fittings and then assemble the steam/exhaust/feed-water components to the engine so that we can complete the boiler test and check everything operates before installing into the boat.

En-route I drew up a plan for this to choose the appropriate fittings and a bill of materials to match.

This single sentence hides many hundreds of pounds of components and hours of hand-wringing and frustration!

PTFE – one lesson that has been learnt is that PTFE seals in clacks and valves will not work at 250psi, as their maximum operating temperature is about 190C  (saturated steam at 250psi is at 207C or 406F) and at that pressure the operating pressure limit is very low – so PN32 valves are no-go and PN40 or above is what is required. (So I have quite a stock of ball and globe valves which are going to need to go to eBay 😦 ).

Here are a couple of pictures showing the current state of play…