Table of contents for Issue 4747 in Model Engineer

Martin Evans can be contacted on the mobile number or email below and would be delighted to receive your contributions, in the form of items of correspondence, comment or articles. 07710-192953 MEeditor@mortons.co.uk IMLEC The International Miniature Locomotive Efficiency Competition is now only a week away and it promises to be a memorable event. So, if you are doing nothing on the weekend of July 19th I suggest that you might head over to Southport. As well as the competition itself, there will be trade stands and several craft stalls. The 16mm and gauge 1 tracks will be available to visitors, as will the larger gauge tracks during the evenings. Saturday evening will feature live music and food will be available. Camping for tents, caravans and camper vans will also be…

Ron Fitzgerald takes a look at the history and development of the stationary steam engine. Continued from p.19, M.E. 4745, June 14 Despite the unpremeditated destruction of the Trevithick’s first venture into road locomotion, he remained convinced that steam powered transport was viable and included a more sophisticated version of a road locomotive with a coach built saloon intended to carry passengers as a central feature of the patent. Eighteen months elapsed between the sealing of the specification and building a prototype which is generally assumed to have followed the lines laid down in the patent (fig 189). Francis Trevithick’s recounting of the events that led up to the construction of this, the well-known London Road Coach, is confused. He seems to suggest that immediately following the destruction of the…

Continued from p.81 M.E.4746 June 28 Having been stridently warned that he wouldn’t be held responsible for mishaps arising from our own endeavours, we previously discovered that the author’s traction engine shared sufficient similarities with both all-terrain vehicles and automobiles to allow offthe-shelf components to be employed in his increasingly customised transportation trailer. In this, the penultimate episode of the present topic, we learn how he keeps his railway equipment from flying unbidden around the countryside. A firm anchorage In truth, the methods used to secure locomotive Jennifer Ann and her accompanying wagons to the trailer, while they still took some trial-and-error experimentation to get right, are largely conventional and probably of less interest than Ruby Swann’s arrangements. However, for completeness, and because the editor insists, and with the hope…

Dedications To my long suffering wife for her support over many years. To all the people at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust who have kept me well enough to complete this project and achieve an ambition plus much more. A debt of gratitude is owed to you all. Acknowledgements Before starting I would like to express my appreciation to all of the people and businesses who have helped in this project, mostly quite unknowingly. Some of them must think ‘Oh no, not that eccentric oddball again?’. I have no commercial links to any of them other than as a customer. Some are our better known model engineering suppliers, others are suppliers to wider industry and more in other areas of supply to our miniature worlds. Of perhaps special note, exceptional…

Idecided to have a go at making regulator spindles (photo 1) for a 16mm locomotive, turning ⅛ inch stainless steel down to 2.2mm. No matter how sharp the tool or how light the cut, if the rod didn’t snap off it came out with a taper. After wasting 4Feet of stainless I tried with brass – with the same results. I decided to make something to solve the problem. Thefirst effort was made in situ in the tool post but it wasn’t much use because once it was removed from the post I couldn’t get it back on centre but it did set me on the right lines to make the following, which works perfectly, is easy to make and even easier to set up. Mine can be used to…

Views and opinions expressed in letters published in Postbag should not be assumed to be in accordance with those of the Editor, other contributors, or Mortons Media Group Ltd. Correspondence for Postbag should be sent to: Martin R. Evans, The Editor, Model Engineer, Mortons Media Group Ltd, Media Centre, Morton Way, Horncastle, Lincs LN9 6JR F. 01507 371066 E. MEeditor@mortons.co.uk Publication is at the discretion of the Editor. The content of letters may be edited to suit the magazine style and space available. Correspondents should note that production schedules normally involve a minimum lead time of six weeks for material submitted for publication. In the interests of security, correspondents’ details are not published unless specific instructions to do so are given. Responses to published letters are forwarded as appropriate. Rust…

Continued from p.76 M.E.4746 June 28 I really should give some guidance on the choice of hardware for this engine. I have elected to detail metric threads wherever possible. However, there are some places where there is no alternative but to use BA or ME threads. If the modeller prefers to use BA instead of metric, then the following changes can be made. The prototype engine was in BA as at the time I was not aware of a source of small metric hex head set screws. The 1st article covers the address for these (knupfer.info/shop) for a supplier of metric hardware. Obviously, there are similar sources for BA hardware and the following can be interchanged: M1.6 = 10BA M2.5 = 7BA M3.0 = 5BA M4 = 3 or 4BA…

Continues from p.71 M.E.4746 June 28 Live steam boiler design modern alternatives The hobby’s infatuation with silver-brazed copper for smaller live steam boilers has always fascinated me. For one, the cost of manufacturing a small copper boiler has become incredibly expensive, as it’s not by any measure the most thermally efficient boiler material, it tends to scale badly in operation and manufacturing the boiler is difficult and dangerous. I would like to emphasise the dangerous part of my last statement; manufacturing a copper boiler requires the whole assembly to be heated to a minimum of 600 degrees Centigrade for silver brazing (400 degrees if TIG welded), then acid is used to remove the flux and scale and the whole process is repeated a number of times before the job is…

Continued from p.97 M.E.4746 June 28 Trunk guide Starting with 12mm diameter material face each end to bring it to final length then spot, drill and ream to 10mm. I used a 6mm drill followed by a 9mm and then to ensure the hole was true used a boring bar to open the hole out to approximately 9.75mm before running the 10mm machine reamer through (photo 12). Cut the chamfer on the end at this setting which is needed to ensure the connecting rod clears the trunk guide. If you don’t have a collet it would be better to drill and ream while still attached to the length of bar to avoid distorting the thin wall. Set the guide up on parallels in the mill vice, locate the top and…

After being at the receiving end of a failed check (clack) valve, when all the steam and water started to escape from my locomotive’s boiler, I have looked more closely into the design and particularly the relative sizing of inlet holes and the stainless steel balls that make the seals when under pressure. When a ball is fitted into a check valve it is important to get the numbers right, matching the ball to the bored and finished inlet hole. An inspection of the failed check valve on my locomotive indicated that the stainless steel ball used was, firstly, too small for the inlet hole and, when put into use, it lifted but then did not drop (it floated), indicating that it was able to lift too high. Consequently, and…

Continued from p.86 M.E.4745 June 28 Hattersley looms Another landowner encouraging innovation was Lord Leverhulme, known on Lewis and Harris as ‘the Soap Man’ because he had made a fortune making soap and other vegetable oil based products. An enterprising man with a flair for promotion, he took the title of ‘Lord of the Isles’ causing some resentment among native islanders. Buying the Lewis and South Harris estates, he took an interest in islander welfare though his paternalistic methods were not always well received by crofters and fishermen who had been used to independence. He encouraged the introduction, however, of cast iron hand looms from 1919. These were made to a standard pattern by Hattersley of Keighley, a firm more famous for power looms. These looms were precisely made and…

Serendipity, the art of making happy surprises, hit me one day when researching the origin of coaxial cables and their connectors. The purpose is to convey wired electric signals over a distance by temporary means, or for test purposes. I had thought that they had been invented in the WWII era, but they were actually invented by Oliver Heaviside, the 19th Century physicist, in 1880. They do not rate a mention in the pre-war amateur radio publications and it is widely thought that the cable and its connectors were produced for the atom bomb project, in that shaped charges had to be detonated simultaneously (and I mean SIMULTANEOUSLY!) in order to make things work. Variations in cable length meant that a pulse sent down several cables could arrive at different…