The Home Machinist!

Thanks Bill. The center drill idea is excellent. I’ll give that a try in the morning. The slot is slanted uphill to pull the back gear up into position - I think. If I move the slot to the middle, it binds on the screw head, making it more difficult to move. Alas

I have a low hours Bradford- Bridgeport Clone- J head belt drive mill. Recently started hearing tremendous clatter and clacking noise coming out of the top end if the J Head. Also the machine won’t shift out of low gear- to the high gear range. The inclined ring and lever on top of the spindle won’t...

Finished up some small details over the last several weeks. I wasn’t happy with undersized hinges I originally bought on line and installed to open the engineer’s doors on the cab. At the last minute, fabbed up more robust, shop made hinges. Used 1/4” hardened pins for the latch and 1/2” round stock...

Original, Sandely Locomotive Works double action air pump. NOS. Appears to have never been placed in service. $4500 or best offer. Actually, open to any reasonable offer. Located Seattle, Wa area. But it will fit in a USPO flat rate box, so shipping is a fairly easy and cost effective option. Glenn

Note: pending sale as of 9/27/2023… I am disposing of my collection of patterns and castings for a 15” gauge 4-4-0, and some some smaller gauge odds and ends. Looking for a reasonable way to move these out so I can downsize to a smaller shop. Make an offer! Also, will consider donating some items to...

Tim, post some pics of you can. It would be very interesting to see your process and a finished example.

Glenn

I would think you could make a die to press individual features into a sheet of material, design a magic marker layout on the end piece, then press away. Similar to cutting louvers.

1018 CF (cold formed) steel would be ideal for your axles. CF round stock is ground and finished to a higher precision than 1018 hot formed, and you don’t have to deal with removing the typical dull grey mill scale coating on the surface of the more common hot rolled material. 1018 CF is Probably yo...

You might take a look at Discover Live Stem.com. Lots of rail has been sold through the site. Jim, the site moderator, can give you a sense of what rail is selling for these days. Also, this is the go to site for live steam railroading sales. So if you choose to list there, you will reach a large gr...

Little surprised no one has mentioned the possibility of sweating the wheels on your axles. Sweating them on involves heating up the wheels a little bit so that they swell a thousand of an inch or so and simply slipping them over an appropriately sized axle. Once they cool the gripping force of the ...

One of the train order threads said some burner styles include fire brick at the aft end of the boiler. The brick gets superheated - red hot- and acts like an ignition source. So if the flame blows out, the hot brick will re-ignite the oil vapor stream - with a big “KA-BOOM”. Also, apparently oil bu...

Me too. Hopefully someone will offer some background. The only design criteria I know is that a burner typically has two orifaces, or ports, one to provide oil flow and the other to introduce steam to atomize the oil flow. Seems like the diameter of the ports and shape of the nozzles, etc are import...