Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs

French Beam Engine

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Bogstandard:
Peter,

I do know that the drawing shown is in the public domain, I was just raising concern about the rest of the plans for that engine.

I also scan that site a lot, in fact, one of the engines that I used to make as a commercial undertaking is very loosely based on one of their free plans, I just made it a lot better.

I personally have purchased all the plansets that interested me on that site, and I can say that they are well worth buying. They really do make up into nice models, in fact John Somers has made the sister version of the one you have just started. I know that because I made the flywheel for it. In fact, I turned it into a bit of a teaching post.

http://madmodder.net/index.php?topic=871.0


John

websterz:
French Beam Engine? Where does the white flag go? :palm:

doubletop:
John

All's well; I had no intention of publishing the plans, that's why I pointed people over to the French site. As you say they are well worth buying and the guy deserves a plug. As you know I've made the twin oscillator as well and was very pleased with it. I took the view this one should be equally as good.

websterz

Not sure which version of history you are alluding to but if a flag is required I'm sure those requiring one could work out where to put it.

Anyway preamble over, let's get on with the build..........

Pete

doubletop:
This project has been moving on a bit since I started around 7th May, about 10 days ago.

Silver soldering of the cylinder and ‘saddle’ I placed the fluxed saddle in the hearth with three pieces of silver solder  sandwiched between it and the cylinder, cylinder on top. Heating it up the solder melted and the cylinder settled into place.

There was a hairline crack at the ends so rather than risk it I re-soldered the ends by placing 3 small nuggets of solder in flux on the ends and re-heated. One end at a time.

After the pickle, a quick blast in the sand blaster to give it that casting look.



As you can see its been reamed and all the holes and ports drilled and milled. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. As Bogs can attest I struggled with soldering this time last year.

Next was all the bits that bolt onto it.



And loosely assembled



Next came the base plate. This was just a mark out, clamp to the mill table  and mill/drill as required. As I’ve said I have DRO’s on my mill but I still took the time to mark it out as a second check that everything was where it should be. The DRO’s make the job relatively easy as you can always get back to any point. The DRO rectangle function helped with getting the three slots finished although I freehand roughed them out first up close to my marked out lines



The standoffs were a quickish job now I have worked out how to easily setup a backstop on my lathe.  I realized that I can install collets in the nose and fit the chuck over the top. So with the ¼” collet and a suitable length of rod I have my backstop. OK somebody is going to tell me you all do that, so do I now.

Cylinder assembly in place



Next was the bearing blocks, relatively simple and done before morning tea today



Now on to the flywheel. This is another donated piece of scrap from Murray (Imagineering). It was a dirty black ring when I was given it and in a quiet moment had stuck it in the lathe to see what I had.



Clearly it was destined to be a flywheel for something, now is it's time.

Serendipity applies from time to time in this game and I just happened to have some 64mm dia ally and the hole in the ring was around 63mm.



It didn’t take long to get it down to a nice fit  with the intent of loctite’ing it in when ready. The next job is to machine some spokes. If that doesn’t work I may resort to a hub and silver steel spokes. I’ve seen both done on the forums



That’s it for now;  because  you have 10 days compressed into 2, things will slow down a bit from now on.

Pete

DaveH:
Pete,

Looking rather splendid :clap:

Like the look of the flywheel.

DaveH

Edit - finger trouble!

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