The Home Machinist!

An earlier post mentioned the name "Pergande".

Their name and the engine should show up in LALS records around 1970 or before.

As best I remember, Pergande, father and son, were the original owners of this 2-4-0. It was most likely built from Bob Harpur's parts.

Eugene Crowner

Years ago, I had a Harpur Mogul. In the good old days in Los Angeles a foundry supply company along the Los Angeles River near the ATSF roundhouse sold Utah coal. It was quite smoky. A friend gave me some coke from the widow of a patternmaker. I broke it up and mixed it with the coal, roughly 85% co...

Long ago I bought a Mintz 5 chime mouth-powered whistle. Mintz still shows on the computer. Years later I machined a whistle from Cole's of Ventura whistle castings. I used the lengths of the 4 shortest tubes - highest notes - of the 5 chime whistle to make a nice sounding whistle for my locomotive....

While it is not too clear to me, when skimming through the book "The Challenger Locomotives by Kratville", the first series of U.P. 4-6-6-4's did not have cast frames. Later the front engines on part of the first series were rebuilt with cast steel frames.

Eugene Crowner

Why not a picture of a Cole's Worthington pump? Many years ago, part of my early experience with machinery was building a Cole's Worthington pump. There are a few corrected mistakes in it, it might not last too long if I put it to work. With 35 PSI from an airbrush compressor it will squirt, with it...

Dave: I fail to see what the diameter of the boiler has to do with respect to a pumps effectiveness. If you need water you need water and you use a pump. I was not aware that you size an injector by the diameter of a boiler -> I thought that you sized an injector (and pump) based on steam consumpti...

As can be seen in the picture, I had one baffle across the tender of a Harpur Mogul. The tender top plate simply sat on brass angle. I soldered a few rivets on the top plate to fit into holes in the brass angle. That helped to make sure the load of an excessively dimensioned engineer did not spread ...

I had a Harpur Mogul. For a while I used a ready made plumbing tube of sheet metal from the hardware store. It was about two feet long. It even had a taper that about matched the stack. It got to be a nuisance after a while, and I quit using it. One of the fellow members at LALS sometimes called me ...

Trainman4602 has it right, for best results the bars of the grate should be tapered. That way, anything small enough to get between them will fall through to the ashpan rather than clogging the area between the bars. With nothing burning between the bars, more air through the grates keeps the bars c...

Here is a picture of Bob Harpur on one of the engines at his shop. He was building them when I was buying the machined parts for my Harpur Mogul.

I always had a lot of respect for Bob.

Eugene Crowner

Before a boiler test by Gary Kubicek, with clean and dry hands I left a fitting only finger tight. After the boiler test, with wet and oily fingers, I was not able to loosen the fitting. Kubicek saw me reaching for the closest tool in the toolbox, a pair of pliers. He all but slapped my hand and for...

For best results, go to the Steam Whistle Yahoo Group, they have the formulas and all. Many years ago there was a Mintz whistle sold, if I remember correctly, by hobby shops. It was mouth powered, with 5 tubes giving a very good steam whistle sound. I used the lengths of the four highest notes of th...