The Home Machinist!

What a beautiful peice of machining- cant wait to see it coming together.

I'm getting ready to silver solder the inlet and outlet to the fixed end. I had to make a bracket to hold things in place so they don't move when soldering.

Took advantage of the long Easter weekend and swagged in some tubes.

This is a great thread! Really enjoying seeing your elesco come together!

I finished putting in the tubes and made the end covers.

Starting to do the outer cover.

Finally finished up the end cap. This cap looks closer to the prototype than the print, which was more square ended.

Starting to drill the holes in the body from the exhaust. Tricky part when starting a hole on a curved surface. I first started off with a 1/4 ball end mill and go down until I can use a spot drill. Then use a drill to go through. Next I'll use a 1/2 endmill, then bore to 5/8.

Ball mills are rather best hole starting too. Bar none

Holy cow what a sweet looking job!

Thank you Bill for the compliments I really do appreciate that. Well I spent the last 2 weeks trying to decide what the top of the Elesco feed water heater should look like and I came up with this.

And this. My feed water heater had an unique feature. The 2 hex's on top were a venting system that would tie in to each other and feed to a pipe up to the front of the smoke stack. The hex is attached to a pipe that runs down about a 1/3 of the way into the heater center.