The Home Machinist!

The southeast has plenty of tracks too, not as old as some others, but still good. There's Eagle Point in Tennessee, all of the railroads (6 or 7 I think) that make up the Florida Live Steamers, Apex in North Carolina, The Palmetto Live Steamers in South Carolina, and then The Canton, St. Paul, &...

Got the front truck done! The gears roll nice.

Pipescs wrote:Tristan

Can you post a photo of the truck from the end? I am looking at how to hang my brakes on the Rust Bucket's trailing truck and am curios how you did yours

Charlie

Here you go Charlie.

Didn't get a whole lot of time in the shop today, but I did manage to make sme chips. I got two of the small gears bored out. Next I have to turn two new hubs to press into those holes, then cut off the old hubs and weld the new one. Once that's done, I just need to broach the hole and drill and tap...

The front truck is reassembled and is starting to look more like a shay truck. Next up, two of the small gears and some test running.

gcarsen on here makes a nice form tool that makes the flange about 0.05" wide to allow for a finishing cut on each side of the flange

Thanks guys!
I got the second large gear finished tonight. The plan right now is to do two small years and have the front truck's drive shaft complete and spinning before next Wednesday for the fall meet at the CSPPRy.

The first gear is done!

Nice looking work, sir! Well thank you! Sorry for the lack of progress, I've been busy with school these past two weeks. I have finally started on the gears. I've got two fixtures on loan from a friend for them which has helped immensely. The first one is a 2.5" piece of steel turned to 1"...

One of the most common practices I see is people attaching a homemade wand to the blowdown valve and just use the remaining steam pressure and hot water to clean the engine.

I just did some searching on the forum. it looks like I should have about .005" clearance between the cylinders and pistons. I know that I don't have that! :shock: Looks like I'll have plenty of material to chuck up the pistons buy the rods and take a cut. :mrgreen: Now I have to do a search o...

I've started this thread as a place for discussion on the topic of hydrotesting boilers instead of in Jeff Smith's for sale thread. My understanding is that a boiler is to be tested to 150% of its operating pressure, plus or minus 2%. As for having a model boiler code like Australia, such a code wou...

Jeff, my advice would be to make a listing on Discover Live Steam . As for boilers and their testing, this has been a hot topic at my club recently and turned into a discussion that lasted for several days. I wont mention the outcome here but will make a new thread in the live steam section for ever...