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Results 1 - 30 of 1998
Does anyone out there have any information about Elijah Ware and, more importantly, his 1861 steam carriage. I know that it ended up on Prince Edward Island circa 1867. There is a Scientific American article that gives some data, but not as much as you'd like ... and some is ambiguous. There were a few articles printed in the very early 20th century but they conflict and some of the technical d
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SteamStuff
A gentleman from Pakistan has a small shop and wrote asking if we knew of a steam power plant capable of providing 10kva, which comes out to about 13.4 horsepower. I figure he'd need a minimum of 20 hp by the time you consider system losses. Do we know of anyone making an engine in that range? About the only thing that I can think of is the Reliable kits.
Regards,
Ken
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SteamStuff
The whole idea behind naptha launches was to sell to a bigger audience. In a number of states, you had to obtain an engineer's license to operate a small steam launch legally. This is asking an awful lot from someone who just wants to putt putt around the lake a dozen times a year with his family. Then Ofeldt noticed that the laws specifically referred to STEAM, i.e., vaporized water. There w
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SteamStuff
On the club Facebook page, we have two new videos of the General Electric / Elihu Thomson Steam Surrey running under its own power. (Links at bottom)
When dealing with a vehicle almost 125 years old, we can't expect the first run to not have problems. Incredibly, the steam system appears to have functioned well, it was the steering that was an issue. The tiller is connected to a steering box, w
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SteamStuff
Hey,
I'd love to have girls, the more the merrier. The only downside would be that we might have to be a bit more careful about the scratching...
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SteamStuff
Boatbum,
What do I do? Beside spending a few hundred hours a year helping edit the Bulletin, dealing with administrative issues, writing articles when we can't get any submissions, answering questions from various sources, and helping with meets?
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SteamStuff
My worry is that this is from Facebook -- it doesn't take money or resources to look at videos, and we still don't have younger people checking it out. Once upon a time, SACA's membrship skewed much, much younger. Maybe it's a stable trend, but it's kind of worrying.
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SteamStuff
Sigh ... this came from our Facebook page, I really wish this was more of a bell-shaped curve...Furthermore, I know some of the women credited as being members are actually men using their wive's accounts...
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SteamStuff
I lost my chance to visit Australia back in 1980 -- we were crossing the Indian Ocean at the sort of sustained ship speeds which require nuclear power when the Iran/Iraq War broke out. We had to turn around to do some not-very-subtle intimidation to stop both countries from shelling oil tankers and the situation never cooled down enough for us to return to our previously scheduled liberty port.
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SteamStuff
Hi Bill,
You would never get the idea past the people at Bonneville since they prohibit the use of pressure vessels -- and the rocket is just a reservoir of water at high pressure and saturation temperature. You could get a bit more speed by angling piston engine exhaust backwards, they did this with WW2 fighter aircraft. It's not a huge amount of gain since the mass flow rate is so small thr
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SteamStuff
Hi Rick,
It would be an epic drive! Chris lives in Australia.
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SteamStuff
Hi Folks,
Chris sent a couple of videos of the car on jacks, but running on steam from the original circa 1900 boiler. The videos can be seen at the SACA Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/steamautomobile/
Ken
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SteamStuff
Here's a link to some photos of a Shay locomotive in Cadillac, Michigan -- very near to where the first Shay was built and operated.
Cadillac park Shay locomotive
This is on the SACA Facebook site, where we also post links to steam related You Tube videos every few days.
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SteamStuff
I dunno, man. That crankshaft, unsupported after the connecting rod, looks shady as all get-out. I'm wondering if it wasn't plugged into some other kind of machinery which provided bearing support ... like maybe a pump, winch, factory tool, or so on? It sure doesn't look like anything even vaguely automotive, I'm not seeing a variable cutoff/reversible valve gear in sight.
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SteamStuff
It's kind of a bear to make a valve like that work --- you need really tight seals to keep it from leaking when the valve is closed. On the other hand, you don't need to be quite so tight when throttling.
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SteamStuff
Hi Dusty,
You're giving Lear far too much credit. When someone asked him about what his car was to run on, he said 'Learium', having no idea what that entailed. In actuality, as one would expect, it consumed water.
Now, Walter Minto actually got Datsun to spend money on his Freon powered car. I would have expected better from Nissan Heavy Industries, one would think that they would have un
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SteamStuff
Hi Dusty,
The Still engine refers to a series of diesels that used waste heat to produce steam for a bottom-cycling engine. It can sometimes also be found under the term Still-Kitson. It was used in some locomotives, ships, and stationary power plants.
There are a number of references, one of which can be found at: Still Diesel
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/still/still.
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SteamStuff
Riding this at Bonneville might be problematic. They are concerned about water dripping onto the salt and ruining the track for other vehicles. I understand the Jim Crank car raised some hackles on that point.
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SteamStuff
I have no idea what happened. We had three separate topics on the same project. To make future searches easier, I decided to merge the topics. I merged the first two without problem and when I went to merge the third, all three were erased. By clicking backwards through my browser, I was able to recover the text of the merged file -- but none of the photos.
If you could send the photos to
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SteamStuff
Hi,
I was out on the road and found out about all this from a voicemail that I received from Scott. Unfortunately, I was refilling at a gas station and just read the transcription, which confused me because the system turned "Hi Ken" into "Hi Megan". Anyhow, I am a fine ten finger typist, but can't type for spit with my thumbs on a smartphone, so I just gave a quick reply
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SteamStuff
Apparently Google noted my home address was the same as my home address, and since it was in a zoned residential neighborhood decided that we were "Out Of Business". Just a stupid computer error.
Regards,
Ken
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SteamStuff
Hi Bill,
I probably ought to note that one advantage of an engine driven turbo is that you can stick a bypass.reducer around the engine to drive the turbine directly -- if you were standing idle for 15 minutes and wanted to make a quick getaway, this would be a lot more aggressive than other options.
Ken
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SteamStuff
Hi Bill,
The only two classes of combatants to use the Foster Wheeler boiler, that I'm aware of, were the ten Garcia class frigates and the six Brooke class guided missile frigates -- my brother served on the second Brooke class, USS Ramsey, which strangely enough was named after the father of the captain of my own ship. Unfortunately, such a low number of builds makes it really hard to find o
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SteamStuff
Hi Bill,
The Navy's "P-fired" boilers were essentially a more compact and modernized Velox boiler. The turbo charger didn't have what you would call a traditional center bearing assembly, it was an electric motor. This drove the compressor during startup ... and added extra power when combustion gasses were not totally sufficient.
There's a problem with conflating a pressure fir
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SteamStuff
I think that everyone had a good time. If anyone has photos or videos, could they please contact me? I'd like something to post to the club's Facebook page.
Regards,
Ken
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SteamStuff
Hi Jim,
Assuming that you never exceed the 300 psi boiler rating which online sources give for the Lykamobile, the water temperature should never exceed 417 degrees F, which is the saturation temperature at 300 psi. Generally speaking, fire tube boilers generate saturated steam, unless a superheater is added, so I would guess that your steam temperature should not be significantly higher. It w
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SteamStuff
Hi Jim,
This was a quote from Dave Nergaard, who apparently used the magnetic float arrangement. I think it went into a Bulletin article but, between having edited something like 60 issues and having written about 5 books for Tom Kimmel, my memory is simply getting fuzzy. We can ask Dave, if you'd like.
A somewhat more elaborate method that I thought of was to wrap a vertical copper standp
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SteamStuff
There are other alternatives. Rolly built what looks like a very decent Derr level gauge.
Then there are always vapor tension thermostats used as a water level sensor -- Charles French seemed fond of these.
I seem to remember a Ofeldt sensor which was basically an expanding metal thermostat with a needle and gauge attached.
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SteamStuff
Dave also had an alternative sensor, as I found in an old email.
Some additional thoughts; the enclosed article and commercial
magnet floats. These floats are designed to operate reed switches in a
tube on which the float runs. A series of reed switches on a resistive
ladder yields a reasonable water level gauge.
The gauge described in the article has served well on my car for
sixteen ye
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SteamStuff
I have an article that Dave wrote on the topic. Unfortunately, it is a text file so maybe a bit harder to read. It is at the bottom of the page but does not have a schematic.
These gauges work by measuring the capacitance between two charged, insulated surfaces -- the water level varying between these surfaces. Typically they would either be plates or tube in tube.
The way this is done i
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SteamStuff
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