Garden Railway Forum

I feel the need to resurrect one of my Mamods. I have two that were modded about 20 years ago, both have regulators, lubricators and O ring fitted pistons and meths burners of differing types. Plus a standard engine in a pretty poor state.

What are peoples opinions of the various mods that available now. I was wondering about the new boilers from RWM or Dream steam, I have read of a few problems with Dream Steam in the past and would welcome people thoughts.

The modded pair should be a reasonably imple job with hopefully just new O rings and seals but the standard engine is crying out to become a Super Mamod!

Roy Wood all the way. His boilers and cylinders are second to none, and he also supplies o-ring cylinder o-rings separately, so you can get them in one cache. Roy constantly looks to improve his range and tweak the PPS goodwill he inherited.

For example, PPS went with gas burners where the burner box didn't have ceramic, just a metal box as it were with about 54 holes in them. I swapped out an old ceramic burner for one of these new burners as the steamline on my 'Swordbreaker' was corroding the ceramic [elevated burner, an 0-6-0 Janet monster...] The new box burner is like a little blow torch, gets upto pressure in under 6 mins. Tested at Elsecar.

The RWM cylinders are second to none - they transformed my loco in 2013, and the tech support in July 2014 for them was second to none when I sent them for an MOT back to RWM HQ. The only crit I can find is the use of red rubbery o-rings particularly in the rev blocks when firmer o-rings would be better.

I think that a Roy Wood boiler will be the way to go. How are they on meths?

The rwm boilers are fine on meths but just as a word of cation I have one of these boilers and the o-rings supplied with it( or they were at least with my boiler) are pretty useless. You should replace them with some fibre ones. Also the paint that they are painted in is rather weak, I had to get mine repainted.

But other than that they are pretty excellent!