The Home Machinist!

Personally, I believe that it is very foolish for us not to establish national standards for not just boilers, but for brakes, public riding cars, and operator training and safety. I think we are just asking for it by not doing this. The Australians have a workable boiler code and other requirement...

Those are all great ideas, I will check with a local hydraulic rebuild shop that I know of and see what they have and what steel its made of. I know the D&S and the Tweetsy both get their tires from Edgewater Steel in Edgewater PA. The D&S a few years ago paid $1047.00 each for their blind 4...

Men I'm looking at sources of driver tire material. This is for the driver tires for my 11" dia & 1” thick driver tires needed on the K-36, but I also have other locos to build in this scale so I’m researching material for all of them. In my Ryerson Steel catalog, I see listed a Cold Drawn ...

I will be very specific - the last pressure vessel quality carbon steel plate I bought cost me $1.31 per pound. The last copper (3/4K water pipe) I bought cost me $5.86 per pound. In Texas, a boiler over 12" inside diameter or with more than 2 square feet of grate area must be a 'Texas Standar...

ASME code don't allow no copper! Leave it up to our government to screw things up. The brits love the stuff, haven’t hurt anyone with it in over 87 years and we can’t use it in an approved (ASME stamped) boiler. What about the “R” stamp? I thought it was just the chrome and nickel material that was...

I’m intrigued by the copper boiler fetish that a lot of British livesteamers have. They seem to love the stuff, so it must be good material and there is a ton of “How To’s” on the subject. I want to consider it for my locos. I couldn’t be obvious, but its true, I confess, I hate any non-chrome &...

Have you considered a simpler design such as the "Lune Valley Burner"? Actually, I thought that this might have been the Lune Valley Burner, I just did not mention it to try to keep things simple. Now that you mention it, do you have a photo of the Lune Valley burner, I'd really like to s...

Does this design call for a starting heater/flame? When starting from cold, the diffuser will not be vaporizing at all. Also curious what size nozzle opening is called for. Steamin I think burning paper on top of the vaporizing tube would have to be the only practical starting method. The fule is g...

I heard from a lot of men about this that all said these were really poor CAD drawings, so that is probably not the reason to buy this CD. The old rules book and other books might make this worth close to the $99 asking price, but I'm wating till it gets down to about $49.95

Men I want to talk about big, but very quiet oil burners. I worked on a real steam loco with an oil burner once, and I still have the ringing in my ears to prove it. While suffering through that experience I said I would find a silent burner that would do a better job of atomizing while keeping quit...

Marty, in the J.F. Nelson book; "So You Want to Build a Livesteam Locomotive" in the article Doug Alkire on the “Stainless boiler", Doug said he used 304A on his B&O pacific. Doug really expressed his enthusiasm for any 300 series material in that article, but that was pre- 1970. ...

Men, I am no boiler guy, never claimed to be, I only know what I read, and I thought using stainless was common for the shell, all though all the livesteam books that I have about boilers are 30 years old now. Maybe my info is old, but don't worry I don't do anything that I have not checked with 20 ...