| Archive for The Unofficial Mamod and Other Steam Forum The Original Unofficial Toy Steam Forum Established 2006 The biggest, most popular steam forum around! Accept NO imitations! We have a growing community of regular posting members who chat about all aspects of toy and model steam. |
| Reid |
Home-Made Model Steam Engine (1907)From a book published by Scientific American in 1907,Home Mechanics for Amateurs click the hyperlink for a free download of the complete book Enjoy! |
||
| Reid |
|
||
| Cranko |
Interesting stuff , thanks for sharing mate 
|
||
| Mister Occlusion |
apparently amateur meant something different back then than it does now.... | ||
| Reid |
Amateur means and meant: not of professional nature. It does not mean that the work may not be -superior- to professional work. For example, Thomas Jefferson was an amateur scientist. The book contains chapters teaching the amateur how to do amazing things with humble materials. It is well-worth a download. Here's more, another engine. "Stirling" is a term that has only recently been given to the old heat engines. The old timers never called them Stirlings; would not have thought to do-so, for Stirling did not invent the "caloric" engine; Stirling invented the regenerator. |
||
| Reid |
|
||
| Reid |
double entry error deleted | ||
| Reid |
Interesting technique: the text notes that a marble is used as a stopper,
serving also as a safety valve in case of a flash-back of flame into the reservoir. A good way to minimize the damage of an exploding alcohol lamp. I'd say that stuffing the a reservoir with copper wool (Chore Boy scrubbing pad) would obviate any such risk of a lamp explosion; same principle as Davies' flame safety lamp. |
||
| Mister Occlusion |
Didn't know that burners had a habit of exploding... Doesn't the wick or wadding (in the case of a vap burner) keep the flame where it's supposed to be? Maybe they mean the marble serves the same purpose as a vent hole, to equalize the pressure inside.... I think, in many cases, Amateur is used in the same context as Novice. That's obviously not the case here... Although sometimes I do wonder if grandads were born with a hammer in one hand and a lathe at their feet. |
||
| Reid |
OTOH, in a case where a lad has used a cotton wick in a short-font pot lamp instead of asbestos for a wick or even if he did use asbsestos,,,, and if there is air in the reservoir and the mixture of air to fuel vapor is just-so, absolutely: a lamp could and would explode violently. The fatal danger is a short metal font leading to a pocket of air directly underneath; I am not speaking from experience, but only from deductive reasoning. If that had not been known to happen, no-one would have even thought of the marble as a safety valve idea. With a marble as a sort-of stopper, the pressure would simply kick off the marble and the lamp body will not rupture. So it is a good idea for reservoirs -in- the fireplace- so to speak. Today I think I'd use a steel ball, magnetized, and set to a tin, it would act as a very nice stopper indeed, if it's not too heavy nor too strongly stuck to the hole, which it will not be, not to a sheet steel container. As noted earlier, if a pot is loosely filled iwith copper wool (scrub pad) then it cannot possibly explode. The spark could never get fire to pass the copper, for the heat of the nascent flame will be absorbed by the copper. I say copper because copper will not rust nor burn. Steel wool will in time rust away due to the water content in the alcohol. Most know that steel wool in open air burns very nicely indeed, though that has no bearing on explosion-proofing a pot lamp. |