Well it’s been cold! But we have had 4 short trips out, mostly between Ferry Nab and The Jetty museum, and around Belle Isle. But while the high pressure has delivered lots of sun , it has provided absolutely NO wind!
Continue readingWell, it seems like high time I provided an update, as the last one was in April!
At some level it feels like not much has been achieved, but that’s because a lot of the work has been “bitty”, finishing up jobs and tidying up items that had been hanging around for a while – and then there was the distraction of needing to design/build a new garden shed (the last one literally blew down – the joys of living 900ft up in the Pennines!).
So here is a list of the items I can recall completing…. Continue reading
While we wait for the plasma cut boiler plates and housing to arrive I went back to a job that’s needed doing for a while on the engine; the Lubricator.
There are several approaches to lubricating a steam engine, from a hand-held oil can (tends to be a bit erratic, and you chop the end of the spout off in moving parts) thru oil wicks, to pumped lubrication. I felt that a pumped system was the way to go.
There are 11 bearings that need lubrication in the engine (3 main bearings, 2 big ends, 2 little ends/crossheads, and 4 eccentrics). Actually, there is cylinder lubrication as well, but we are going to deal with that via a separate displacement lubricator which injects oil into the incoming steam (a sort of 19-century “posi-lub”! Continue reading
SY Befur 