Glover Steam Locomotive Dash-Pots: Re-Valved, Re-Seated, Restored!

[Music] hello keith rocker here venice machinery.org guys today i'm working on a little project helping out a friend of mine that is in the process of restoring a steam locomotive made by the glover works up in marietta georgia back in the day he's got a steam locomotive that he's doing some work to and he asked me to do a couple of repairs to some pieces that he had here and i'm going to explain these parts to you just a minute but these uh are some valves that go on the front of the steam chest on the engine so there's on the steam locomotive you have two engines one on each side of the locomotive the steam engine and if you're from not familiar with steam this might be new to you the old steam guys hang on a minute we'll get back around here to second but uh steam piston when it's at the very front what happens is there's a slide valve up above this that goes back and forth so when that piston goes forward this valve moves and it opens up a port that pushes the steam back at the same time it opens a port on the back side of the piston that allows the seam to exhaust so it pushes the piston back and when it gets to the back side the valve moves the other direction and does the other thing it opens up the exhaust on the front of the piston and it opens a port that pushes that piston forward so up on that valve we have this little valve i often hear these referred to as dash pots some of my steam books call them just relief valves but basically what this is is it's just a valve that closes whenever it's under steam pressure but then as soon as you release the steam and the steam pressure drops in the in that valve chest the steam chest or in the cylinders and or in the cylinders the the valve automatically opens and what that does is it allows any steam that's in the the engine to escape out why is that important will steam is of course uh water in its vapor form when it's in that heated state it wants to expand well if you have that thing all sealed up and you come in at the end of the day and you're through running your engine or you go into the station and you sit for a little while before you move again the temperature of that cylinder will start to drop and when that happens the steam which was spread far apart because it's hot it's going to start closing back in together and you actually create a vacuum inside that steam chest inside the steam engine they can make it difficult to kind of get things back going so by this valve automatically opening up it basically allows the atmospheric pressure inside the engine to be the same as the atmospheric pressure outside it releases any vacuum and keeps that engine from locking up kind of like vapor lock in a gasoline engine so let me show you these and let me kind of show you what we had to start with and what we ended up with our game plan going forward so this is one of the two dash pots again one on each side and this just screws up into the steam chest and the valve is actually up underneath this cover and i've got it loose so we'll just go ahead and take it apart in this lid there is a valve seat and there is a valve this is one of the original valves this valve i'm nearly certain was originally all brass or bronze whichever one this is and at some point in time to stem something happened to the stem and they went in and put a new stem on here but the stem they put on you can tell it's braised on the top here that's steel and of course it's corroded we want to have a brass stem on there or a bronze stem in this case is what we're going to make it out of but this valve it closes up and what happens is when the steam pressure comes in here the pressure hits the bottom of this valve and it pushes it tight up against that seat and basically closes this valve whenever the steam pressure drops you can tell that when the steam pressure is on there because this little stem is sticking up by the top but whenever the steam pressure drops down you don't have any pressure pushing on that anymore it the the valve seat just drops down it opens the valve and allows it to breathe so basically gravity just uh opens that valve up and when it's not activated the stem drops down this it'll be more or less flush with the top of this cap when it's like that so here's the issue is uh these valve stems that were in here this was one of them this was the other one and if you notice they don't look anything alike i'm speculating to some degree but i'm pretty sure that this is the original design uh been modified with the steel up here this is one that i think is a replacement valve that was probably made by whoever was running the locomotive this one is all made out of steel it's not made out of brass or bronze and it does the same thing but it's this one is severely pitted because of the rust and corrosion which is why you would really want to use bronze or brass for something like this so basically i need to re cut my seats on here make sure i got a really good seat and then i also needed to make new valves now you know i could have gone this route right here and just made it out of a solid piece of bronze but instead i wanted to cast these and make them like the original so this is a pattern that i made and when i say made i drew it up in fusion 360 some 3d cad software and this is just a 3d printed part and it's warped a little bit now it's been a while since they made these these uh castings but i sent the pattern out to my buddy clark easterling over at windy hill foundry and he in turn cast two new valves for me of course these have got to be machined but they are of the style of the original here and this is oversized we got to put the the proper angle on there the the valve stems are oversized on either side like i said we got some machining to do these uh to to get them to work but we're gonna basically replace the two valves with the new castings that we got done from windy hill foundry so that's the game plan you can kind of see my parts here by the way i think clark did a video on uh molding and casting these parts i'll try to put a description of that or link to that down in the description this video in case you want to go see that process it's been a little while since he did it this project's kind of been waiting to get done uh they haven't been in a big rush for it so it's kind of been on the back burner all right there you go let's get over here and start doing some machining and get these castings turned into finished valves we are over on the monarch model k 16 inch lathe and we'll go ahead and start machining these now guys this is all rough casting so there's nothing on there that's true we're going to make it true on the lathe so you're going to see a little bit of run out i've kind of tried to minimize that as much as i can but just being rough casting that's what we're starting with we got plenty of material to take off to get it turned down true i'm going to start by facing this end we're going to put a center in here so that we can put a center on there to give it some support i'm actually going to move it from chucking it here to chucking in on the tab in the very back so that i can do all this uh machining pretty much in one setup uh so that's my game plan now and uh we'll just come in here i'm just gonna real lightly do this i don't want to get too heavy because i got a lot of stick out there and no support right now we're about to fix that but that is cleaned up on the end now let's come in with our center drill [Music] and we'll drill us the center hole there and that will give us some support here once we extend that out there we go so i've got it checked up out here on this little back tab we got the front running on the center now and uh running pretty true that rough casting diameter there is about 800 thousands roughly and it needs to go down to 5 8 which is 625 see i'm just gonna start with a cleanup pass just to kind of come down through here that may not completely clean it up but uh it'll give us a start [Applause] [Music] and i'm going to just kind of face this back as well we need to clean that up a little bit on the back i'm just going to go ahead and do that while i'm right here [Applause] i basically just want to get it where it's cleaned up get all that rough casting out of it [Music] take another little pass there [Music] and i'll see if that cleaned up or not let me get a little bit more [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's probably fine all right we'll uh see where we are on this diameter we're about 7.85 we're going to 6.25 so we got a little over 100 thou to come off of that [Applause] [Music] take another pass here whittling it down i've still got another uh was that thirty thousandths uh to come off of it we'll get another measurement after this pass [Music] all right so we're measuring uh 620 or excuse me 660 we want to go to 625 i need 35 more thou i'm going to dial that in 10 20 30 5. [Applause] [Music] [Music] just going to pull out that face all in one cut and [Music] that looks good and we're right on the money on that diameter all right so this diameter needs to be 2 and 5 8 inches so let's come in here and start cleaning that up see where we end up at [Applause] that should be really close right there [Laughter] [Applause] right on the money okay and i have my compound set on 40 degrees which will allow me to move my cutter in at that angle here and we're going to go ahead and cut that face on there uh yeah let's just do it [Music] and that's cutting that angle [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so i'm just feeding in for my depth of cut and then i feed out with the cross slide [Applause] or the compound rather to cut the angle so feed in with the cross slide feet across with the compound [Applause] and we're just going to keep doing that until we get that uh valve angle all the way across there [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i'm wanting this inside area here to be a little less than two inches actually we're right on the money right there and that's not a critical measurement i just want to make sure that that this inside diameter is a little bit smaller than the diameter of the hole that's going to go down so we get full coverage all right guys i think we're about done on this side i do need to flip it around and do some machining on the back side but i think i'm going to go ahead and get the other one done while i'm at it i do that one off camera uh while i'm set up in this operation i'm just going to go ahead and do everything again so there you go uh we're making progress we'll finish this up in a little bit turn the valve around backwards and the last thing i need to do is uh just face the bottom of this off that needs to be two inches from the top of the valve to the bottom of the valve and we're about 75 thousandths over that right now so just come in here and touch off and start cutting those out [Music] all right let me get a measurement now that we got a surface that we can work off of and we are at two inch o five five that in my readout on my z-axis to .055 we need to go to two inches and i'll just dial it in on the readout [Applause] and it blew it away [Music] and i just want to lightly chamfer this bottom surface down here and also want to come up here and jam for this surface right here [Applause] and i think that valve is done all right i'm gonna do the same thing with the other one and we'll be done with this part still got one more step to do after that so the last step here is i need to recut the valve faces on these seats these are the lids and i need to make sure that they match and now i'll go ahead and tell you that there was two valves one of them i think was original that one was set at an 80 degree included angle so 40 degrees in one direction uh the other one was that homemade valve and it was set to 90 degrees and i think this is the one off of the 90 degrees so we're going to basically have to re totally re-cut this one and the other one will just have to freshen up but i've got this set up over here let me zoom you out we can kind of see my setup so i got my compound set to 40 degrees and we've got a boring bar in here to actually cut that internal diameter and even though it's cocked over it will be going at the 40 degree angle that the compound is set to so we'll get that valve seat all turned out we just want to get it cleaned up take no more than we have to and uh we'll go do the other one and i think we'll be done with the machining for this job so that uh valve seat is turning pretty true i'm just kind of pulling my cross slide to me until i start cutting right there we'll just uh get that angle set right [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right that sounded like it was cutting all the way down let's see if this yep that is uh all trued up so oh yeah that fits good and for the final step here what i want to do is i want to actually lap these two surfaces together so that we get a nice perfect match and uh i've mixed up some lapping compound this is just a little bit of abrasive that's kind of a in an oil based solution i actually have this as a powder and i mix it with a little bit of oil it's called time saver this particular lapping compound is good because it uh it'll break down so if you don't get it all cleaned out of something it's not like it's gonna destroy whatever it's uh coming in contact with now what i'm gonna do is i slowed my lathe down a little bit and we're gonna put this in here and i'm just gonna kind of lap those together that uh clapping compound is just gonna go in there between the two surfaces and it will polish those so that they match and mate perfectly little bit more on here i can feel it kind of sucking together of course it's got that oil in there helping kind of stick it but uh still [Music] doing a good job one more time these surfaces should be right in line with one another they're both nice fresh surfaces they should be at the exact same angle so shouldn't take a whole lot of laughing to get them seating together really nice [Music] and i just wipe that off you can kind of see this ring up here that's shiny and this is dulled out that tells me that we've got a good lap it's making contact this is on this is actually smaller than the inside diameter so it's not touching at all there that's the original surface that we machined but from there to there we got to kind of that glossy finish on there which tells me it cut all the way across we've got a good lap that should be a good tight valve i'm gonna do the same thing for the other one and we'll be done with this and with that these are ready to go back together so the uh valve goes in like that and we just uh screw this down like such and when this thing pressurizes that will come up when the pressure drops gravity will drop it back down [Applause] same goes here and there we go two new valves made uh re-seated everything lapped them all together these should be good for another hundred years or something close to it maybe i get these back over to the guys that work on the locomotive and then get these back installed and hopefully they can get that thing up and going at some point in time well there you go guys two re-valved reseeded restored dashpots for a glover steam locomotive and we'll get these back over to that project where they can put them back on and hopefully see that locomotive running again down the road and with that guys that will be a wrap as always thanks for watching please do subscribe to the channel if you haven't already those thumbs up and comments are appreciated hit the bell icon to get notifications and with that we'll catch you on the next video again thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 33,918

Rating: 4.9895439 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Lathe, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Metalworking, How to run a lathe, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, steam locomotive, machine shop work, snifter, dash pot, relief valve, steam chest, steam engine, glover works, glover locomotive

Id: xeVziWYFTEk

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021