Feb. 2019
Bluewater Bulletin
Bluewater Model Engineering Society Sarnia, Ontario
Vol. 34 No.5 February 2019 Editor John Lovegrove
Our next meeting will be on
March 18th, 2019 @ 7:30 pm
Northern Collegiate Room 125, Indian Road, Sarnia.
The February Meeting
We were back in room 215 for this meeting and
although I did not do a head count, attendance was
good for a cold February evening. As usual we
started with the Treasurer’s report and all is still well
in that department.
One of the things that came up last month was the
possibility of a club visit to the Henry Ford Museum
and/or Greenfield Village. Bruce Mannerow has done
a little research and prices are as follows: Museum
$24 ($22 if over 62), Village $28, ($25.25 if over 62.)
There is also a $6 parking fee. It looks as if one can
also get a tour of the F150 assembly plant. I did this
some time ago and it was very worthwhile (they claim
they make one truck per minute at full production
rate.) A visit would preferably be during the warmer
weather; the Village is only open April-October.
He then went on to talk about a video on the
construction of a 5” gauge model of a BR 9F
locomotive of which Evening Star is the best-known
example.
https://www.youtube.com/user/no23mk2/featured
This is UK based and I am not sure how happy Bruce
is about passing on the information – the presenter is
actually using metric size drills! My understanding is
that this is the trend over there because imperial sized
stuff is getting increasingly difficult to find.
The next item to come up was a book showing how to
make miniature steam turbines, in this case the single
rotor, De Laval type.
https://archive.org/details/modelsteamturbin00harrrich
/page/40
There are also a couple of books on full-sized steam
turbines, the first based around those produced by
Parsons and the second around Westinghouse:
https://archive.org/details/steamturbinerede00parsrich
/page/38
https://archive.org/details/westinghousepars00westric
h/page/12
A couple of comments are appropriate: The first is
that archive.org is a very good source of old technical
books where the copyright has expired. The second
is looking at how the advent of the steam turbine
transformed marine propulsion, particularly on large
vessels like battleships. One reads about the horrible
conditions in the engine room with reciprocating
engines at full power, with oil and water everywhere.
When the totally enclosed turbines came in, all of that
changed. The other point relates to the early turbines
being much more suitable for handling the lowpressure
part of the steam expansion cycle rather
than adding a further low-pressure stage to a
reciprocating engine. A typical arrangement at one
point was to have two reciprocating engines driving
propellers on either side of the vessel then feeding
the low-pressure steam to a central turbine that drove
a central propeller. One disadvantage of turbines is
that they cannot be reversed so some type of
reversing gearbox is normally needed. In the
arrangement just mentioned they did not bother
providing this for the central turbine, and relied on the
reversible reciprocating engines for going astern,
normally just for maneuvering. This was the
arrangement used on the Titanic and has been cited
as a reason for them not being able to apply full
(potential) reverse thrust to slow the vessel down
when they saw the iceberg ahead.
The last pair of videos is all about making RTV rubber
for moulding purposes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob9Y7sjI4IA&pbjr
eload=10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFjaVuueEU
The first one uses corn starch to accelerate the
hardening of normal silicone caulking, to make a
mould and also the use of naphtha to thin the silicone
to allow reproduction of finer detail. The second uses
dish soap to achieve very much the same thing.
Show and Tell
Bruce has made a few more parts for his Howitzer.
Firstly, part of the operating mechanism required a
pair of limited motion gears:
These were made using the metric module cutter he
bought from Banggood.
Another set of components needed some square
holes and for this he made up a broach. Firstly the
assembly, then the individual parts:
in fact, the engine now starts very easily, just by
swinging the flywheels by hand (again, demonstrated
in the video.)
A Request from our President
He asked me to put a request in the newsletter asking
members to bring something along to the meetings to
make “show and tell” and the subsequent discussion
a bit more lively. Ideally, if you have been working on
something, bring it along and talk about it. If you are
having problems with a project then maybe someone
has some ideas? Occasionally, people bring along a
“what the heck is it” item and this usually generates
some interesting speculation, even if nobody knows
what it really is for.
Failing this, how about looking at some of the videos
where I put links in the newsletter and coming along
with some comments on what you find interesting,
useful or even downright useless?
If you have an outside workshop, getting stuff done
this time of the year is problematic but there are some
other possibilities to keep the little grey (model
engineering oriented) cells active.
Small Fasteners
Sourcing these was discussed at our January meeting
and Nick Jonkman sent me a link to the company he
uses for this type of thing. It arrived to late to put in
the last newsletter, but here it is now:
www.zoro.com
In fact, they seem to be more of an industrial supply
house and the other organization I have used who are
geared up to supplying the hobbyist is:
http://www.microfasteners.com
They are located in Easton PA but are happy to ship
into Canada. They use US Mail so that packages
arrive via Canada Post without going through a
broker, and without having to pay duty, if the value is
small. They have a good range of small American
thread fasteners and also metric (unfortunately no
BA.)
Meetings for the Rest of the Season
March 18th (11th is March break)
April 8th
May 13th
June 10th
Our Website
https://sites.google.com/site/bluewatermes/
John Lovegrove
Last month Tony Koolen brought in the combined gas
demand valve/carburettor he had made up. This has
now been fitted to the Perkins hit-and-miss engine
and equipped with this, it now runs properly. Tony did
not think it was a good idea to bring the engine in to
demonstrate, now that we are in a regular classroom
rather than the workshop, so he made a video of it
running using his I-pad, and showed this to everyone.
Below is a picture of the engine running that I pulled
out of the video.
One can see the propane canister and BBQ type
regulator that feeds the demand valve/carburettor
connected to the inlet valve port.