Elbow Engine

OK the project begins, but in truth it started a few weeks ago when John showed me his engine, from that moment

.
Since then I’ve bean exercising my little grey cell

, 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.pdfAnimation shows how they work.
http://80.177.213.1/images/anim.gifMy 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

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.

And have a bit of fun along the way.
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

please throw in your two pennyworths, good and bad comments will be equally appreciated,
and lets have plenty of humour.

Cheers

Stew