Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs
French Beam Engine
doubletop:
It's time to start my own topic over here, and give the rest of us have something new to look at while the Brits spend their weekend at the Harrogate show.
This isn't going to be a blow by blow account of what I'm doing as its more about me improving my skills rather than a 'how to'.
As with most of these projects, the start is governed by what materials may be to hand. Some months ago I stumbled across this lump of bronze in the scrap yard.
The flange was an odd shape, wouldn't fit my little mechanical hacksaw, and hand cutting it was way too slow. So I tried a slitting saw in the mill. To start with all went well and I got the lump into more manageable chunks. At the time I had in mind doing Bogs Paddleduck, so was aiming to get two cylinder blocks out of it by way of a start.
Inevitability disaster struck, so it was back to the hand hacksaw.
(OK lesson learned #1, use the right tools for the job.)
Some months passed; having spent the best part of 9 months working on my locomotive, that's now working pretty well, so on to something else. I have a copy of the plans for a beam engine from this French website http://jpduval.free.fr/. I've done his twin oscillator vertical marine engine and the quality of this guys plans is excellent so had no trouble in deciding to do another of his engines. I have no French but sites like Bablefish come in handy if there's something I don't understand.
I started off with the cylinder, no idea why, but to me it's the obvious starting point. The plans imply machining the cylinder from solid, I didn't do that and preferred to fabricate from two parts.
The cylinder was another piece of scrap bronze I picked up from one of the guys in the club. It already had a 10mm hole through the middle so was just a case finishing the outside and running the boring bar through it out to 15.8 mm ready for the reamer later. (no pics)
The valve block was a chunk of bronze from the big flange (above) and I used the arc function on the DRO on my mill to form the seat for the cylinder
The two parts fitted together quite nicely ready for silver soldering later
Next part was the valve chest. Another lump of that flange attacked with the home made fly cutter
And a nice shinny block to work with
That's it for now, more later...............
Pete
saw:
Hi, this should be intressting, good work :thumbup:
Imagineering:
Looking good so far Pete,
(from the other guy in the club) ::)
Bogstandard:
Pete,
Please be careful with those plans, and don't show too much. They are not the free ones from that site, those ones with a few others are copyrighted, and you have to buy them.
They do make into very nice models BTW, very elegant looking.
John
doubletop:
Guys
Thanks for the concern; I'm very much aware of IP issues whether the documents are marked or not, and only posted a copy of what is already available on the website here http://jpduval.free.fr/Liste%20des%20plans/Liste_dossiers_plans.html. In particular http://jpduval.free.fr/Liste%20des%20plans/mv%2016x32%20bal2.pdf ( I can happily replace the .jpg with a link to the .pdf if the moderators wish)
That said I'd recommend going over to the site and taking a look around, OK its all in French but pictures paint a thousand words and there's plenty there to whet your appetite.
Pete
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