May 2017

and other areas such as brewing (you get to see lots of different steam engines in action.)

Turning to library matters, Keith Orr has ordered a year’s subscription to Model Engineers Workshop. I am sure he will bring in the first issue to arrive for us to look at. He did bring along the book "The Steam Engines of Ray Hasbrouck" giving information about the various engines Ray has made. One salient feature is that none of them involves the use of castings. Bruce donated a book he had on building the Allchin Traction engine to the library. (I guess he has given up any thought of ever building one.)

As is quite often the case we got to discussing some of the bizarre things that happen during war time: One was that Krupp apparently sued the British government over patents infringements relating to a 25 pounder gun. Another fairly well documented case is that of Tetra-Ethyl Lead made in the UK being diverted to Germany (via Spain) and ending up as an octane enhancer in the gasoline used by the Luftwaffe in their bombing missions over the UK. (Presumably this gave them an incentive not to bomb the TEL plants!)

Two visitors (prospective new members?) Tom Dunn and Larry Patterson were at the meeting and Tom asked about where one can buy a lathe and mill suitable for our hobby, at a reasonable price. Many of us have been faced with this situation and it seems to be that occasionally one can pick up good used N. American or European equipment at an acceptable price but it is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. A lot of us have just ended up buying new Chinese or (preferably) Taiwanese equipment that is probably good enough for what most of us do.

There was some discussion about steaming at Komoka this summer. Ed Spencer is not putting out a schedule but is planning to have his first run on June 11th.

On a sadder note, someone mentioned that a former club president, Garry Wilcox had died. From the date in the obit this must have happened shortly before our last meeting:

the bore and OD. Fortunately the eccentricity is similar on both gears so if you assemble them high side to low side they will go around, if not they just bind.

John's pump parts

This was rather more sparse than the really good show we had last time. Tony Koolen has made some more progress with the tender for his Case Traction Engine; mainly putting in openings for access/connection to the water tanks.

Tony's water tank

NAMES

Bruce went on Friday 21st to grab some table space and eight of us went on Saturday taking some models to display. Attendance at the exhibition seemed to be about the same as last year and most if not all of the all of the usual vendors were there. One difference was the reduced number of seminars. Previous years they have run parallel sessions in two different rooms but this time they only ran one set of seminars. Apparently the issue was that with sessions running in parallel, if two concurrent talks were of great interest, one sometimes had a hard choice about which one to go to and there had been some complaints about this. (The problem has been solved by eliminating any choice!)

Here is a picture taken inside the Yack Arena late in the afternoon after the crowd had thinned out:

He also had the pyrometer he uses to check the metal temperature before pouring a casting. This is based around a "K" type thermocouple which should go up to ~13000C.

Pyrometer

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I have just finished the oil pump for my Sealion. It is a gear pump driven by the crankshaft using 4:1 reduction worm/skew gears. (I am not sure when skew becomes worm.) I have never made a gear pump before but the clearances have to be as tight as possible otherwise leakage past the gears will prevent any worthwhile pressure being developed. For similar reasons, the centre distance should be such as to minimize backlash. Having tried hard to achieve this, when I assembled everything I found that the gear teeth must have been cut slightly eccentric relative

Meeting Schedule for the remaining 2016- 2017 Season

2017

May 8th

June 12th

John Lovegrove