Garden Railway Forum

Condensate in colder weather on start stop normal. He's in Oz and it's summer here. It was +30degC where I am the other day. 8) The crackling will have increased when the Chuffer was fitted, as it diverts the condensate and oil into the hot smokebox, instead of it being ejected up the chimney and o...

Roundhouse safety valves have a 5/16 x 40 ME thread, which isn't listed. So you would need to talk to Polly Engineering about a special order, otherwise you would need to make an adaptor.

Same with Accucraft, who use metric threads.

Graeme

You are fighting two processes with the gas setting. As gas is drawn off the liquid in the tank gets colder and the pressure drops, but if the tank is in the cab, it also heats up from the boiler during the run and the pressure rises. I found early on that test running a new loco on the bench was as...

Having made the roof from two layers glued together whilst curved, it is holding its shape a bit better, but i still think is going to need some internal bracing. I've found when laminating polystyrene sheet for roofs that three layers works much better than two for holding the shape. I also leave ...

Aster have used a range of boiler designs over the years. This particular one is a gas fired single flue boiler, but the flue is much larger than usual and the front tube plate is almost at the front of the smokebox. The gas burner design is unusual, instead of the usual poker with slots on top (or ...

A bloke with a beard left a box in my workshop recently. I don't know how he got in as there is no chimney in this house, but the guard cat was probably asleep on the job as usual..... ./myff/1684422/Caradoc+1.jpg This is the box and the contents....... ./myff/1684423/Krauss-1.jpg ./myff/1684424/Kra...

Graeme - You mentioned drawings of the K1, do you know if there are drawings available for the Ceylon H1? I understand Brian Wilson has built several models of the H1, so there must be drawings out there somewhere... Brian has built at least four. I've seen two green ones, a red one and a black one...

But it's the heated area that's important. What he said. ;) I dusted off my thermodynamics when I tested the Roundhouse loco., out of interest. RH boilers have about 10% thermal efficiency, but the burner generates about 5MJ/hr flat strap, so has no trouble turning water into enough steam for their...

They are full length standard type slotted-top burner tubes.  I used the popular 5/16" K&S brass tubing. Interesting, the first burner I built used 1/4" K&S tubing and it howled like a banshee. I somehow managed to get the dimensions just right for the gas flow to resonate...........

Just out of interest, would the large Titch boiler be more suitable? I don't have my Titch drawings to hand, so I don't know if LBSC changed the diameter or length of the boiler when altering the design. What about the Juliet boiler? That's a similar sized loco if I recall correctly The small boile...

With my project, I calculated that my loco would use twice as much steam as a Roundhouse due to the gearing and cylinder size.  The boiler is 3" dia by 6' long with two 3/4" burner flues and only one internal 3/4" uptake. Great minds think alike...... 8) What burner design are you us...

I was wondering if rather than trying to design big boiler from scratch and hope that it steams well why not consider using a proven small 3 1/2 inch gauge loco boiler design such as a Titch or Rob Roy. There is plenty of information around for designing boilers from scratch and existing designs ar...

So you may be able to run four cylinders from the standard boiler but you would end up with quite a low powered set up. That was the point I was trying to make. The power output of a steam loco. depends on the ability of the boiler to convert water into steam. However, not all Garratts were earth s...

I've been doing some bench testing of a standard Roundhouse boiler, testing the limits of the operating envelope. This boiler isn't a Lady Anne type, but it has the same dimensions. The only difference is the position of the safety valve bush. Maximum steaming rate with the burner wide open was 17 l...

MDLR:94040 wrote: Only if you've got the right water to put in the boiler...............  :occasion9:  :cya:

Use the wet stuff. Dehydrated water takes too long to come up to the boil........

The most important thing to do is to drain the water that remains in the boiler after a run. That would be worth doing, especially for brass boilers like Mamods, but only if done properly. In industry there are two methods to store a boiler if it won't be used for a while. One is known as water wed...

When you think I used to live within a few miles of the SVR and you are telling me what is there! I don't even know what and where the SVR is..... ;) No magic involved, just that I remembered seeing something like it when I was researching Fowlers a while back and it turned up in a Google search. W...

The body style and proportions shout "Fowler" to me. The bodywork is similar to the ex LMS Fowler diesels that the BR Engineering Dept. used, although they were sg and had jackshaft drive. There's a photo of one of them, or a close relative, here on the Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/p...

Though, I have been told that the DI prosess introduces H+ ions and thus the resulting water have an excess of H+ (makes it acid?) which makes it agressive to brass. (?) I've also seen that, but it is only half the truth. DI systems have two ion exchange resins in them. One resin replaces the catio...

Does RH make a boiler bigger than the Lady Anne's? Yes, the #24 boiler and the L&M boilers have about 50% greater water volume, but they still have the same burner and flue size as a Lady Anne. They are also the same dia. as a Lady Anne boiler, so the extra volume comes from the boilers being l...