Rebuilding a steam engine with steam power

foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to another old steam power machine shop you know it's been quite a while since i set this shop up and started taking videos about five years in fact so i'm getting some questions from viewers about different parts of the shop and how i came by it and how i set it up and how it works so i think in the next few videos i'm going to cover some of that and go back and recover some of the equipment and and get the new viewers up to speed on it we fired up this morning i got some planar work to do so we'll be short with this and get right to it thanks for watching this is the boil that supplies all the power for the shop it was built in 1924 by monday uh steam hoist company and it was actually a boiler for steve boyce here this morning and uh about 60 pounds of pressure showing on the gauge uh i fire it with uh scraps and junk lumber mostly some coal i have a friend that has a woodworking shop across town and he surprised me all the scrap i could possibly burn so move in a little closer here the draft for the fire is controlled by this door down here and most of the time i keep just keep it cracked open a little bit because i found that too much draft works against you by allowing cold air to go up past the fire so you really only want to give the fire as much air as it can use up here we got the same gauge and the water glass it shows the level of water right now it's up above the top these are called tricox and they're positioned at a level where you can check double check the water glass and you can see there's water coming out of there so i know that the water is at least up to that level and the same with these down here uh the valve to clear the glass if you get sediment in it below that are the injectors try to get in a little closer here these are the two injectors that supply feed water to the boiler to make up for the water that's used in the process of making steam and these injectors have uh steam input valves and water input valves and this is a fine tuning valve for this one and another one on the back for this one and uh what these do is they actually use the boiler's own steam pressure to inject water into itself and you think how can that possibly be but it works because of several scientific principles and a little bit of magic i i'm not sure that the inventor back in the 1800s really understood how his invention work but the steam condenses one it works sort of like a siphon pump if you ever had one of those things that you hooked up to a garden hose to pump out your boat with where water flows past an orifice at 90 degrees and it creates a vacuum and sucks the water in behind it all this does it with steam steam blows across an orifice sucks the steam the water in behind it which instantly condenses into water droplets which have much more mass they're traveling at the same speed as the steam but they have more mass so they're jammed through another orifice and it forces water into the boiler that's briefly how it works it's more complicated than that but that's briefly how it works this course is the main shutoff for the feed water which needs to be turned on now this is a extra valve to input into the boiler if i need to feed if i need to fill a boiler from a pump or something to get started with from scratch this valve here controls an ejector and i'll show you how that these two tanks here are feed water that comes in from my rain water collection setup and uh can't get to it to point to it that little device right there is a ejector and what it does is similar to an injector but it's used for just moving water from one place to another so the steam comes in the side pulls the water in behind it from my feed rain water system and uh distributed distributes it to these barrels and when the water is in these barrels i can put any kind of chemical water treatment i want to in it and i use a little bit of ph up to get the ph up to around nine and i use a boiler compound called boiler saver that does a lot of good things for the boiler as far as preserving it and making it steam well this is the this hose pulls the water out of the barrel to the injector and i can switch it from one barrel to the other this uh drain here i can switch from one barrel to the other and it's the return from my heating system i've got some radiators out front that i run a slight amount of steam through to heat the front part of the shop and that's the return for the condensate up here you have a main steam shutoff and then this valve runs the branch that runs to the small ons engine that i originally ran the shop with and i'm in the process of hooking up to a dc generator this branch over here runs to the big engine that runs the whole shop the chimney for the boiler i haven't talked about i just forgot about it but this chimney i built myself it's cast of concrete around us uh 16 inch diameter steel oil drums welded end to end for a flu i don't know how tall it is i intended it to be a little taller than this but i got tired of hauling the concrete up the scaffold in buckets mixed it all with a by hand with a concrete mixer took quite a while to build it but it'll be there for a while this is the relief valve which in this case is set for 70 psi and it will open and bleed off the steam to keep the pressure from rising above 70. and it's piped outside of the building but there is a vent on it so some of the steam comes inside of the building a small amount which basically keeps water from building up in the pipe and freezing boiler is inspected by new york state department of labor twice a year i have an external inspection and an internal inspection which it passed this year and there's a certificate right there on the wall this is the main power for the shop it's a 1902 eight inch four 10 inch stroke engine built by a company called richards ironworks in mount colic wisconsin i was very fortunate to get this thing and in very nice shape it's probably rated at about 60 horsepower and would have been suitable to run a sawmill operation or a furniture plant or some other industry it is absolutely gross overkill in this shop but it just sits here and homes along at about 90 rpm and does the job very well the the boiler is actually rated at about 15 horsepower so you can see i'm a little short of boiler for this engine but running the engine under such a light load as it is it seems to work out pretty good this device here is the governor for the steam engine and it keeps the speed constant when the engine is running these balls by centrifugal force will be pulled outward which closes the steam off and vice versa if the engine is running along and a load comes on and it starts to slow down these balls will drop in and raise the rod there's a valve down here which gives it more steam maintains engine speed and it does it within a few rpm it's a very sensitive governor and it works really well built by gardner governor works in quincy illinois you can see the builder plate here richard's ironworks this device is an oil pump it's uh pumps a special kind of lubrication oil uh with this rod it's got a ratcheting mechanism in here and as the engine move runs this rod moves back and forth and the ratchet turns this shaft and there's a sight feed spout up in here behind this plexiglas which originally was glass and it's adjustable it pumps it out the bottom out through the tube and up into the uh main steam pipe here and uh just a drop every minute or so is sort of uh absorbed into the steam and it runs through the engine and lubricates the slide valves and the piston and rings in the cylinder the rest of the engine is lubricated by lubrication fittings of one kind or another some like these just take a squirt of oil now and then this has got some cotton waste in it which allows the oil that you put in there to slowly work its way down into the crosshair and on the crankshaft then we have grease cups which you fill with grease now and then and uh just give them a little turn and the screw thread forces the grease down into the bearing the main bearings on this right now i have just set up with cotton waste and i just give it a shot of 90 weight gear lube every once in a while the connecting rod also has a grease cup on both ends of it and once a day a quarter of a turn is all you need on them the belts in the shop are almost all leather and most of them are probably over 100 years old this was a new piece of belting that somebody gave you i don't even remember who it was but it was a really valuable thing it was a 50 foot roll a brand new leather belt and i've been running it here for five years on or uh three years on this engine this is a little bit loose it's not quite loose enough to take up yet in order to take it up you have to cut the splices you have to cut the belt behind the splice which takes out about three quarters of an inch of the belt and then you gotta re-make the crimp-on belt lacing and i've showed how that's done in several earlier videos uh as far as maintenance go i just put a little neat foot oil on the back side of the belt like once a year and that's all the maintenance i do the smaller one s engine here has been a real good engine and it ran the shop for three years with no problems at all i had way more than adequate power uh but when i got the big engine it just sat here so i decided to hook it up to a dc generator which i have done and it has a speed increasing counter shaft here so that i can get the rpm on the generator up to about a thousand rpm which it needs to be in order to excite the field so i'm still working on that i haven't had time to really dope it out yet and get it producing electricity [Applause] this is a steam pump uh two inch four by three inch stroke very common thing in the old days they use them to pump water every every way you can think of and uh it works very well i've had it running a couple of times i don't really have any need or use for it at the moment but if i ever enlarge my rain waters collection system i may use it to pump water around with always quite a lot of interest on my barnes drill here they're quite plentiful around the country there's still a lot of them around they made these of this design for many years starting in about 1890 so it's very hard to tell what actual year this is but i can tell you the history of it uh my father bought this at auction when a company went out of business in a week of new york called champion wagon works and their claim to fame was they had some very heavy-duty patents on heavy wood wagons that they made for quite a few years and and other things and this drill was in the auction and it was hardly used at all and of all of these that i've seen it's the only one with a square table i don't know why that is or why they ordered it that way or what the deal was but most all of them have a round table i have it build it up to my line shaft this is the cone pulley setup you can see it's got four speeds and then it has a back gear which is like a little planetary transmission set up in here and when you release that it locks up and then it's direct drive when you have it in this position it has a reduction gear in it so you have basically eight speeds and then also next to the comb pulley is a tight loop system that works with a foot pedal which shoves the belt over onto the tight pulley that makes the shaft on the drill press run that's like a clutch and i'm running a cross belt here because the way my shaft was turning and the position that i wanted the drill press in it would have run it backwards so i run a cross belt to make it run in the correct direction this south bend lathe is a nine inch junior built in 1926 and it's like an old dog around the shop it's kind of worn out but it just has so much sentimental value to me and i use it a lot it was my father's lathe he bought it in an auction at the high school local high school after world war ii when they got rid of all their national defense training uh equipment during world war ii they bought up any kind of old machinery they would run in order to teach kids how to do machine work so they could work in the defense plant or whatever and uh so this is a remnant of that the junior has no power cross feed and uh a lot of other things that you find on the regular south bend it doesn't have it was kind of a stripped down version and in fact it never had any thread dial and i do a lot of threading on it small jobs so uh my buddy tom and i built this thread dial and it's featured on one of my earlier videos but it's basically made out of parts you find around the shop it's adjustable you can disengage it or drop it down into engagement four inch thread dial seemed to work pretty good i've got a chinese chuck on it as well as i have a three-jaw for it which is an unusual chuck i have never seen another one quite like it it's a scroll chuck but i i like it because it's short and close couple to the bearings the number one shaft is the first shaft that i put up it's uh inch and 15 16 mild steel it's a piece of new shaft and uh starting on this end the first pulley was the pulley that drove it from my uh small ons engine and you can see that in some of my earlier videos the next pulley runs the nine inch lathe uh over here to a tight loose system it runs this counter shaft and the counter shaft has a step pulley it runs down to the lathe i also have an electric motor up there so i can run it when i don't have steam for like something simple and quick that i need to do this little pulley on the end comes down and runs a quarter twist to a small drill press uh it's a buffalo forge little sent to what they call a sensitive drill and working on down the line that wide pulley there runs the drill press and a cross belt get the speed the direction right next pulley is the main drive to the engine next pulley runs over to the counter shaft for the shaper and it has a tight loose pulley set up for a clutch and it should have a cone pulley right there it runs down to the shaper to match the comb pulley on the shaper but i don't have one so i'm just running it at one speed for right now more about the shaper layer and moving down the shaft the next one next pulley runs my larger lathe through a counter shaft with a tight loose pulley and a clutch and then a three-step pulley arrangement down to the lathe now i didn't have a three-step pulley to match the diameters on the lathe this pulley here i made a wooden pattern for and had cattail foundry cast it up and i machined it in order to have a matching pulley when i went to pick it up emmanuel says you know you might want to want to make your patterns a little thinner because this pulley turned out to be like 130 pounds but i wasn't sure how much i had to leave the machine okay moving down the line to the next pulley [Music] is the long belt that runs across the shop to the number two shaft and that drives the planer that's all i've got on that shaft at the moment and that is not a leather belt that is a fabric belt that i bought on ebay seems to be working really well a leather belt would have cost probably over two thousand dollars next belt runs the counter shaft for the little cutoff saw racine cut off shaw and that belt runs all the time there's a clutch on the saw next pulley on this side here next pulley is on the end of the shaft and that runs the transmission for the milling machine and the transmission has two speeds and a neutral both way too slow but that's what i got now one other thing i was going to tell you is that there are three hanger bearings on this number one shaft i had two of them i wanted them to match so i took one apart and took it down the cattail foundry and emmanuel cast this one up and i machined it to match also the counter shaft on the shaper has the same style bearing hanger but a little bit smaller so i and i only had one of those so i had them cast up one to match that so one of those is a reproduction and one of them is the original one and i can't tell right now which one is which the same deal went with the cut off saw i had another even smaller version of that same hanger with only one of them so i had emmanuel cast up one and uh machined it and that's where that one came from i like that kind of hanger so well that i'm probably eventually going to replace these three over here on the number two shaft but i don't particularly like them they're stamped steel they're kind of flimsy and wobbly i mean they work okay but uh so i had a whole bunch of them cast up there's five of them there so i'm going to use three of them up on this shaft eventually it'll also get the shaft up a little bit higher closer to the ceiling which will be good so the number two shaft runs through the wall out into the front shop and there's a there's a bearing up there with a shaft outboard of it it runs here to a tight loose setup for a clutch on the planer get out here back so you can see it the pulley arrangement on the right is just a clutch it shifts across from a loose pulley that spins free on the shaft to the tight bullet that's keyed on the shaft and it spins this counter shaft and the counter shaft is actually part of the planer the large pulley is the return speed on the planer and the small pulley is the cutting direction pulley which is crossed so you have one pulley across and one pulley straight so that gives you the forward and the backward on the table these belt shifters shift the belt one is on the outside idler and one is on the inside idler and when the table gets to this right spot where the dogs cause this lever to be shoved in it moves the belt shifters so that the belts alternately run on this center pulley which is the pulley that drives the table i got things squared away in the shop a little bit so i can get back to the rebuild job on the lyle engine that i disassembled last fall and i figured where do you start you know why not start with some of the easiest stuff so here is the slide bars for the cross end and what these are are two bars that are parallel with the spacer between the them head slides back in there's two on this side and two on that side they're all identical except for the two top ones that were drilled and tapped for a lubricator these hole here can be shimmed for alignment with the uh piston rod and the cylinder when we get to putting it back together again so uh plan is to re-machine these surfaces that are worn and rusted and pitted pretty bad uh on the planer and you can actually see the planer marks uh in these putting away so i know that's the way they were machined to begin with and i wanted to run the planer and uh show a job that's gang that was done quite a lot in the old days where there was a little production job or a lot of parts they set them up in the planer at the same time so i'm going to set up all four of these bars in the planer and machine these surfaces here all at the same time they'll all be exactly the same height did a little work on the planer been sitting here for a while and uh it's been very humid and hot and rainy and the humidity affects the leather belts and this one drive belt was quite loose so i cut the lace off it shorted up about an inch and a couple other things i'll show you the clapper box here has three faces they look like vise jaws they're actually pads for the tool to bear against and uh they're pretty worn pretty beat up pretty warped and this one is broken they're made out of some kind of tool steel of the day i don't think they're all that hard so uh i ordered up a piece of 4140 quarter inch and i'm gonna make some new uh i'll show you where they go one in the middle here and one at the top fits into a little groove so they got to be machined pretty accurately to fit in there nice here's the clapper box tool holder pads made up and fitted into the slots and uh i'm going to try to knurl them on the shaper so we'll see how that goes cross knurling these cutter pads is really an ideal job for a shaper [Music] so so [Music] so so so so [Music] [Music] so [Music] hey [Music] so [Music] c [Music] oh you can see where i messed one up right there a little bit on the first pass trying to hold the tool up and run the camera on this one and you can't go back and catch them like you do on the lathe catch a threat there's no way to do that so i kind of fudged it so 80 degrees at the angle on this side come over to 40. [Music] with the pads installed this is how the clapper box goes together taper pin will drive in tight tool goes in here um so there it is put together on the machine before i assembled that the last time i gave those pads a quick and dirty torch and dunk heat treat brought them up to just a very dull orange and threw them in some water uh it warped one of them a little bit and i uh flipped it over and did it on the back side and it straightened it right out i know that metallurgically totally improper way to heat treat these things but it was uh noticeably hard in the knurl with a file uh after i after i did it and uh we'll see how it goes they may crack but it's an experiment the gang milling setup is going to work like this i made a stop down here which is a permanent fixture for this machine now just a piece of bar drilled for uh t-bolts and that's stop for the parts pump up against i'm going to machine them side by side end-to-end like this now these things are called screw clamps or a lot of other different names depending on what part of the world you're from but they're basically just a stop that i machine with this for a screw these are just long hardened set screws 5 8 horse and they're in here at a 15 degree angle so they kind of push down on a little bit to hold it down but it can't get anywhere main thing you want to do is have a stop at the end here that's quite substantial and then i uh these are uh planar stocks that tom made one day and i've got a little fence here and a piece of filler material so that these work pieces don't fall on a t-slot and so when these are tightened down it should be pretty pretty secure normally these would have a point but since they're hardened set screws they've got a hollow point and i think that'll work just as well we're going to find out so these are all set up we'll tap them down in there and maybe run a dial indicator across them just to see how they shake out i'm going to use a one-piece high-speed steel tool that i just ground up a couple of minutes ago which takes forever but it's typically on cast iron on a planer you use a flat nose tool but i've had much better results with old machines that aren't quite as rigid as they used to be by using a tool with a little bit of a radius on it so this tool will go in here like this straight down and be fed across in this direction and uh we'll take a very light cut and a very light feed and try to get as good a surface finish as we can so this so so so well that's the first pass through about ten thousand and you can see it didn't clean up on the uh front two here that was sort of just to see where we're at and put a different kind of tool on there and take another tent off this is the second pass another ten thousand [Music] looks like it's gonna clean up all over here [Music] there are all four cross head slides planed i might take one more pass with a different kind of tool to get a see if i can get an even better surface finish do the finished product okay well thanks a lot for watching and we'll catch you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: David Richards

Views: 22,864

Rating: 4.9783249 out of 5

Keywords: metal working, machines, metal planer, steam power, stationary steam engine, newark valley ny, east broad top railroad, machine shop, rebuilding an engine, line shaft power, hit& miss, antique tractors, antique machine shop

Id: prbSI4Fmxwc

Length: 57min 26sec (3446 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021