Sept. 2016

The Meetings Next Season

There are several large buildings on site housing permanent exhibitions. One contains a number of steam engines and an oil fired boiler that is used to run them. Another contains internal combustion engines, mainly gas engines but also a couple of hot bulb engines and some other items of interest. Yet another building houses a workshop with old machine tools driven by line-shafting. For the August Show, in addition to the permanent exhibits, a large number traction engines, tractors and other pieces of machinery are brought along by different exhibitors.

Taking the first (steam) building, there are a number of interesting items including some Corliss valve engines and two uniflow engines; an Ames and a Skinner.

Here is the Wetherill Corliss valve engine

Wetherill Corliss valve engine

Most follow the second-Monday-in-the-month pattern but I have gone for the first Monday in October because the second is Thanksgiving and the third is rather late to have the first meeting. Also, the second Monday in March is during March Break and the school is closed, so I have booked the third Monday.

Events during the Summer

Once again the club had a display at Hobbyfest and once again we managed to figure out how to put up the tents. We had a good selection of models on show but unfortunately (once again) I have no pics.

What I try to do in the first meeting notice is to cover some of the things that I have seen during the summer that might be of interest to other model engineers. During a visit to Coolspring last year someone I was talking to mentioned the "Rough and Tumble Reunion" that takes place in Pennsylvania each year. I ran a few internet checks on this and decided it was worth a visit.

The show is held at Kinzers PA which is not far from Lancaster. In fact it is fairly close to where Cabin Fever is held so it is basically a long day’s drive from Sarnia.

This is the Ames Uniflow

Uniflow engines came along towards the end of the steam era and I had never actually seen one running. (The "Badger" that runs across Lake Michigan, has two of them but they won’t let you into the engine room.) Anyway, after some discussion with one of the volunteers, he started the Skinner up for me. (So this was something else checked off my bucket list.)

Anyway here are a few of the true internal combustion engines. Perhaps the most impressive is the 1913, 485 HP Cooper tandem double acting gas pumping engine. This is the same pattern as the better known Snow engines such as the one that is at Coolspring.

1913, 485 HP Cooper tandem

This is the Skinner

These engines look magnificent but the two engine pistons, the compressor piston, the piston rods and part of the connecting rod all combine to make a huge reciprocating mass which it is impossible to properly balance. This combined with the piston cooling and piston rod sealing problems, for me, make it a very questionable design concept.

As most people know I have a particular interest in hot bulb engines: This is an early DeLaVergne HA type hot bulb engine from ~1900.

DeLaVergne HA

As well as internal combustion engines in the second building I mentioned there are also a few hot air/Sterling cycle engines. Some are fairly early ones but there is also one of WWII vintage made by Phillips, typically for powering tube/valve radios.

hot air/Sterling cycle

This is a slightly later (higher compression) DH type from ~1915.

DH type

The only other one I have seen is in the Science Museum in London, England. In addition to being very quiet, there is no ignition system to cause radio interference. The small component sticking out of the front of the crankcase is an air compressor. In this case air was used as the working fluid and having it under pressure enables one to get a sensible amount of power from the engine.

I will not put any more in this First Meeting Notice because I need to get it "in the Mail" but I will include some more pictures in the newsletters that follow.

John Lovegrove