Doble Engine Blueprints/AutoCAD

Hello

Does anyone know if the Doble, Bessler, and White Steams engines and other systems were ever drawn on to AutoCAD? If not, does anyone have high quality copies or scans they might be able to share with me so I can start drawing them into CAD format?



Doug
Nampa Idaho

Doug,

Why would you want to do that???
No White blueprints exist that we know about, except some new ones.
I have hundreds of Doble D, E and F drawings and some Besler drawings.
The E engine and auxiliary unit would be absolutely foolish to reproduce.

Jim

So the data will not become extinct. It might even inspire innovation in a younger generation

Hi Doug,

I think making CAD drawings of these engines is a fantastic idea. Huge amounts of knowlege and experience went into getting those designs to the point they were at. Could better designs be developed? Maybe, but let me show you an example of what happens when people don't learn from the past:

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Steam_Engine/Manufacturing_Instructions

Browse through the drawings of the various parts.

Anyone under 25 now doesn't remember life without the Internet. If something is not online they are not likely to find it. Intellectual laziness? Sure, but that's they way it is.

Someone did most of a 20 hp Stanley engine in CAD (unfortunately they only posted rendered images rather than the CAD files or drawings). If someone with an interest in steam power wanted to know how a steam engine is designed, they'd be far better off learning from the Stanley. If there was a library of engine designs that anyone could look at, it would be better yet.

OK, that's probably enough of a sermon for this Sunday morning.

Tim

Hi Tim
I agree to build any engine you need good drawing. It takes years of experience to do both drawing and use them to build engines. I know many can do either one or the other but few that do both.
The 3-D cad drawing you posted aren’t enough to build with and just looking at them there are many errors and omission. There just nice pictures. Even the Bruce Green drawing from the SACA storeroom have many errors. One would have trouble building replacement parts from them to fit an existing engine.
I have worked for over fifty years in construction and have never seen a perfect set of drawings. I know even my own drawing I find errors when I make the part. Some time it’s only a decimal point and it’s easily recognized.
The other problem is the Phorum won’t allow a CAD drawing format be posted. One needs to convert it to a jpeg.
To build a part you need to show lots of detail and dimensions. These can clutter up the drawing. Lots of times I draw with layers so all the dimension don’t show, and I can print with them or without. Most of the time I may only print the area I am working with.

For a sample, hear is a modified Stanley 20 HP cylinder cover I make.
Rolly

Doug-Ji Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So the data will not become extinct. It might
> even inspire innovation in a younger generation

Doug,

Don't forget it is the entire Rankine cycle steam system philosophy that must be studied not just the component design. Then understanding why the designer went the way he did and understanding his goals and the features he desired to realize. Such is not learned from the drawings and to date, no book or series of papers describes why some of these designs were done the way they were. This mass of data has never been collected, organized and made clear in any one publication and THAT should be a paramount goal of SACA.
Attached to this are the questions of where is this archive going to be housed, who owns it, who funds it and is it going to be freely available on some special web site and when?
The problem is also discovering who has the time to go around collecting this data while some really knowledgable steam vehicle designers and engineers are still alive? They go and the critical information goes too.

The interesting aspect today to support continued light steam power engineering is global warming and using non petroleum bio fuels, two matters where a really improved steam system can make major contributions. Plus, consider the dramatically improving sales of battery electric cars, perhaps to the extent where any steamer is going to just be ignored, no matter how good it is. The difference and capital investment between the two to manufacture them is like night and day.

Some other considerations.
The Stanley engine is 1880 technology; the White is still old technology beautifully done and obviously with a lot of testing and development before being introduced in the White car; the Dobles changed the designs so often and did things as complicated as possible, it would be a waste of time and money to ever duplicate what they did. Their control concepts still are of value.
Forget the D, E and F engines. What was much better thought out were Abner's engines for Sentinel, especially the V-4 reheat triple expansion engines and the later Mcculloch-Skinner compound engine.

Some steam car builders in the early 1920s had much more practical, less costly, sophisticated and equally efficient engines than Doble's Series E or F Scott-Newcomb, Delling, Staley, International-Harvester, Coats-French and there were others too. Where are those blueprints and engineering files?

There is one other thing that perhaps would hinder such a plan. Many devoted steam car enthusiasts have amassed large drawing and original data files over the years and often at great personal expense. What can be most distressing is to give someone some of this data in confidence and then find it smeared all over the internet and U-Tube.

So perhaps you can see that there is much more at stake here than just digitizing old steam car drawings. There has to be a competent understanding of just what these drawings represent.
Perhaps the real contribution to light steam engineering is to understand what people did in the past, your archive digitizing idea; but now take that knowledge and design a much better system that would well serve today and into the future.
Anyhow, we do what we can.

Jim



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2014 08:52AM by Jim Crank.

I think there needs to be a better understanding of CAD here. CAD Computer Aided Design. A CAD file is not a digitiized image. I have been using ProEngineer. I think AutoCAD has advance beyond just simply drawwing as well. With ProEngineer demension can be formula to allow a part to to be changed simply. Were one demension dependends on another. Done right parts can easly be scaled. Parts can be parameterized. Roller barrings for example can be generated from a parts table. The table would contain the various demensions. Diameters, number of roolers, and width. A single cad part file can then be used forr all roller barrings. A roller berring part can then be used in other cad parts. These are vurtual parts that move. Rotate and/or slide. A mechanism can be built from parts. Mechanical simulation can find problems. Clearances chacked atc. Temperature effects on clearances atc.

It would be a lot of work to put old drawings into a modern CAD system.

Andy

Hi Andy

You are right, It is a lot of work. But if we are going to help this technology/hobby survive into 21st Century we need to start somewhere.

Doug

Doug
You don’t need to redraw old drawings into CAD, many Architectural printing companies can scan paper drawings back into CAD format files
This process is ideal for the conversion of Architectural drawings, Engineering drawings, HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Maps and many other types of drawings that need to be
As-Built, dimensionally accurate and have the ability to be easily edited in many CAD programs.
Rolly

All files from this thread

File Name	File Size		Posted by	Date
20 HP cylinder covers.jpg	168 KB	open | download	Rolly	05/25/2014	Read message
cylinder head-m.jpg	133.8 KB	open | download	Rolly	05/25/2014	Read message