| Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs |
| Elbow Engine |
| (1/31) > >> |
| sbwhart:
Elbow Engine :ddb: :ddb: :ddb: :ddb: OK the project begins, but in truth it started a few weeks ago when John showed me his engine, from that moment :proj:. Since then I’ve bean exercising my little grey cell :smart: , had a good search through that other site for comments and ideas, and got a set of drawings, had a long discussion with John had a real close look at his engine. Went away did a bit more thinking, made loads of notes, made loads of sketches, got involved with a thread on that other site to try and glean some ideas and comments out of them, collected together bits of material that looked like an Elbow Engine. Drawing of engine http://john-tom.com/MyPlans/Steam%20Engines/ElbowEngine.pdf Animation shows how they work. http://80.177.213.1/images/anim.gif My stash af elbow material And know I’m ready to cut metal:- Roughing out flywheel rim. With a bit of luck, help and encouragement from you guys :poke: :wack: :whip: I’m going to try and refine the design so that it will be possible for most people to make a running engine and keep their sanity. :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: And have a bit of fun along the way. :lol: This will require experimentation, so I’m going to make bits for more than one engine, if one idea doesn’t work I can try something else with the rest of the bits. The nastiness with this engine comes from:- Mr Square, Mrs Friction, and Miss Alignment. These are the things to try:- 1:- Fit roller bearings in the rotating cylinder. 2:- Fit PTFE O rings on the pistons to act as piston rings. 3:- Refine the piston bending jig, to ensure a dead square bend. 4:- Develop a machining method that will get Mr Square and Miss Alignment behaving themselves. 5:- As a bit of a long shot develop some sort of flexible elbow coupling i.e. spring or rubber. 6:- Try some magic Pixy dust as a lubricant. (Zinc Stearate). Some of these ideas may sound a bit crazy but one thing I’ve learnt even when an experiment fails you can learn something that can lead to an improvement or a solution. There’s no such thing as an idea that isn’t worth trying. So you guys in the collective :borg: please throw in your two pennyworths, good and bad comments will be equally appreciated, and lets have plenty of humour. :lol: Cheers :wave: Stew |
| bogstandard:
Stew, I can knock a few bits off your short list, to save you some :bang:. 1) I had already looked at fitting thin wall ball races, and came to the conclusion it wouldn't be any great benefit. BUT, I did look at fitting a thrust race at either end, based upon bicycle principles, loose balls running in grooved channels, and came to the conclusion that if ever I built a 7 or 9 cylinder one (14 or 18 cylinder count), that would be incorporated. But it would mean machining running clearances of around 0.002" or under, just so the cylinder could rotate and still remain almost airtight. 2) Someone has already tried it, and it caused more problems than benefits. 3) Forget it, you only have to fart near the elbows and they will go out of square. Just bend them to a rough right angle, and fine tweak as you go along. 4) This is good. 5) Forget it, these engines work by pushing the opposing cylinder around, and have to stay in perfect synchronisation, any flex at all will just lock it up solid. 6) Try it, it can only do one of two things, better or worse. So, I have just got rid of 66.666% of your design ideas, so everything should now go a lot easier for you :clap: I think we are already taking bets on how far you can throw it, any other bets we can take up as well? I was expecting you to call today, and I had rooted out an elbow for you to play around with, practicing getting it square. :lol: Bogs |
| sbwhart:
Hi John Thanks for your imput :thumbup: I'd already floated the ideas on that other site, with no fead back at all !!!!!!!. I thought that some of these ideas would have bean tried before so went fishing for comments. Bending the elbows:- what I was thinking of was a block of brass to act as a heat sink, machine a slot and a step at right angles with a pin at point of bend:- heat the elbow and band it by eye, clamp it in the block and heat the bend again and let it cool slowly to normalize out the stresses. The material I've got for the fly wheel is a bit small it will end up about 20mm under size do you think this will be a bad thing. I'm planning for appearance to have a brass/ally composit fly wheel. I was comming round today after lunch but my boss high jacked me to go round our daughters. I'll see you tomorrow afternoon. Just for interest for the Guys could you add the U tube video you have of your engine running. Cheers :wave: Stew |
| Brass_Machine:
'Magic Bog Water' ?? Eric |
| bogstandard:
Complete with stroboscopic effects. Bogs |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |