Fabricated Cylinders

[Cary Stewart]

Just a note. Bruce Ward fabricated all four of the cylinders for his Garrett. They are brass and if I recall they have bronze piston and valve liners. It was quite a project. He first tried to find castings that were close to what he needed and got no joy even in England. Before he died he actually ran both engine sets on Steam to fine tune the valve settings. The man who purchased the engine is still working on it. Hopefully I will see it running before I join Barry, and old friend.
Cary

[ironhorseriley]

Dick, PM sent.

[BClemens]

The world of YouTube! 'Mr Crispin' is fabricating his cylinders and goes in depth. He has that drawl of an older Brit but he's a younger fellow... quite talented. This may inspire..fun to watch anyhow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhvVQg19jgs



Bill C

[Mr Ron]

Live Steam magazine has many locomotive building projects that details the procedures for building every part of an engine. They are spread out over months and even years, so I can't tell you which issue to order.

[kenrinc]

The late Bob Reedy did an article on his A6 Atlantic which used fabricated cylinders, an idea he picked up from Ed Yungling. I believe it's the May/June 09 issue of LS. Ed and his son Don have done nearly all of their engines using fabricated cylinder assemblies. Most of theirs have been piston valve.

Kozo Hiraoka has shown how to fabricate slide valve cylinders from solid for his geared locomotives as well as the A3 switcher. I used his instructions to build the slide valve cylinders for my inflated 1.5" A3 as shown below.

Ken-

4" dia raw DuraBar

Part-way through machining ...

Finished cylinder

[Rob Gardner]

It's not often that I have much if anything to contribute, but here is how my fabricated piston valve cylinders are looking in the very early stages for my C&O Greenbrier in 1.6" scale. The design very much follows the Ed Yungling approach. The 1/4" thick profile plates were laser jet cut from my CAD program by Jeff Dute. Jeff's father Dick helped immensely in detailing out the final CAD design from my very rough preliminary design.

I am using heavy wall mechanical tubing for both the piston valve chambers and cylinder chambers which I purchased from a local Marmon-Keystone distributor who happens to be 20 minutes up the road.

In the side shot you can see the side of the "backbone", bolted together from three pieces of 1" plate. The sides still have scallops to be cut to allow the cylinder chambers to 'nest" and will be bolted in from the backside.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and Joieux Noel one and all!

Thanks,

Rob Gardner

[ironhorseriley]

I appreciate all the great input from everyone. Hogging out of solid stock seems very intimidating for the larger scales versions.

[kenrinc]

Here's a working link for JE Nystrom's page on fabricated slide valves.

http://animato.medw.co.uk/3003/3003x.html

Ken

[Loco112]

So it took a 4" dia. Dura-bar to fit the 1.5" scale Atlantic's cylinders inside the cylindrical envelope.

I believe I read that Dura-bar is available up to 28" dia. in any length. That's big enough to get over 3/4 size, 9" scale plus some, so that aught to fit any of our big projects.

You could also water jet or torch cut away most of the excess material, depending on your scale and the depth of cut needed, to reduce your machining.

Whats the cost of various Dura-bar sizes?

[Harold_V]

You could also water jet or torch cut away most of the excess material, depending on your scale and the depth of cut needed, to reduce your machining.

To my knowledge, torch cutting cast iron doesn't work, and if it did, you'd most likely have one hell of a mess on your hands, as the high carbon content would surely lead to hardness that couldn't be machined.

Harold

[kenrinc]

So it took a 4" dia. Dura-bar to fit the 1.5" scale Atlantic's cylinders inside the cylindrical envelope.

... Whats the cost of various Dura-bar sizes?

Nah. It took a 4" dia piece of Dura-bar to make the A3 cylinders. Regardless, I just bought an 8" length of 4" dia material. It was roughly $48 at the time (think it's roughly the same now) and I had to pay shipping so it was purchased with a whole lot of other material so I could justify the shipping costs (speedy metals). I don't have anyone locally that handles DuraBar so I bought a stock of it for all the large parts like stack, sand domes, etc...

Ken-

[Bulbous]

Here's a working link for JE Nystrom's page on fabricated slide valves.

http://animato.medw.co.uk/3003/3003x.html

Ken

Hi Ken,

He also has a couple of pages on fabricating piston valves for his 0-6-0 here:

http://animato.medw.co.uk/3003/060n.html

Cheers,

Matt