Howdy from Arkansas.
I have been building a 39' sidewheel steamboat for about 17 yrs. and am closing in on the project. The boat will steam with a home built 12" x 11" double acting grasshopper steam engine. The boiler will be a low pressure monotube modified Lamont design. We are going to take a trip up the Mississippi R. and learn what there is to be learned about life from a different perspective...one of adventure and wonder from not knowing what lies around the next bend. It has been a long haul with 5 children having been delivered at home and another one to arrive in two months.
The project has proceeded along organicly without plans and many changes from the original concept have occured and probably will continue to change before completion. One of the big changes currently is that I have decided to not use the clapped out circa 1908 5 x 8 double acting that I cut my teeth on learning to machine. It sits now done but will go to shop use in the future. I will instead use a large 12" x 10" cylinder that I found early on in the days of begining this project. Here is the story of finding that cylinder.
Not knowing where to get an engine, I started fishing around town, asking ol' timers if they knew of any old steam engines lying about on somebodys farm. That led me to a farm out on Dead Horse Mountain, so named because that is where all the dead horses in Fayetteville were taken to be burried. The farmer there told me, "Yea, there was an ol traction engine lying about out in the south 40". Hunting around though, revealed nothing but a few scraps of metal and it was suppose that a tennant had already scrapped the engine. And so , I headed off to the local scrap yard on the remote chance it could be found.
The yard was strewn out over several acres and hours of searching produced no results. However, it so happens that I have a strong intuitive vein running through me and I kept feeling that out there somewhere, there was indeed an engine. So the search went on. I kept looking under and about pile after pile of scrap until frustration would lead me to stop, sit down and ponder. For some reason I kept returning to the same place to sit ...comfortable I suppose with a good view of the yard.
After about the third or fourth hour, I sat there pretty dejected and about to give up when my eye was drawn to a familurly curious shap sticking out from a pile of scrap right in front of me. Close scrutiny revealed that it was the header of an old firetube boiler just about the right size for a traction engine. With renewed effort, I started rooting around intensly in the immediate area....but after a time... nothing.... and so I returned to my perch of hopelessness. Guess it was time to go. As I got up it occcured to me that I haden't bothered to check out the very place I had been sitting all this time.... what was it anyway that I had been sitting on? I began pulling out clumps of grass, weeds, bushes ...digging away earth from what ever it was that was deep in the process of returning to. And GREAT CEASER'S SUSSPENDERS, low and behold, there it was! It turned out not to be the traction engine I had been looking for , but a large stationary instead. It was a huge peace of cast iron with a crack in the head flange and 1/4 of the crosshead guides broken away.
Funny thing, it had been there a while...a long while judging how low in the ground it had sunk ...all the while, from the looks of things, other more contemporary scrap seemed to have come and gone cycle after cycle. Some how that chunk of iron, slunk so low, seemed to have achieved a sort of invisability as if hiding and waiting ...not quite ready to give up the ghost....waiting quietly and patiently for yet another round of life. It'll steam on as a grasshopper.
