The Home Machinist!

Here are some photos of a steel boiler I am building for a friend. It has ten type K copper tubes 5/8” od and about 14” long. I did most of the fabrication, and had it TIG welded. It’s the first boiler I have made.

Nice! Better welding than I could do.
~RN

NP317 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2019 1:04 pm Nice! Better welding than I could do.
~RN

Me too! So I hired a pro to do the welding!

Here’s the other end, and the firebox.

Here’s the setup for reaming the front tube sheet for the copper tubes. If the boiler was mich longer I would have needed s taller drill press! The firebox needed to be reamed before it was installed in the boiler, but after all the welding was done on the firebox itself. Rolling the tubes on the front tubesheet was easy, but was a real challenge on the rear, because of the small firebox.

It looks great Dan! We're looking forward to see the engine on the tracks!

Interesting project, what grate area did you end up with?

Hi,
The grates ended up being about 3.5”W X 4.9”L.
A bit smaller than with the copper boiler, but I think it will work fine, with the arch design I copied from Charlie Pipes. Charlie said his American doesn’t steam well without the arch, but he was able to run up the grade at Canton, St. Paul & Pacific with plenty of steam.

Thanks . . . I like that logo on your shirt.

Ha! That’s actually Charlie wearing the MSLS shirt!

Charlie got himself a shirt made that actually says something like: "Don't tell my wife what I paid for this" or "don't let my wife sell these things for what she thinks I paid for them", something like that. Pretty funny stuff.

The boilers we build for the American are all steel. They have 31 - .375" OD seemless tubes. All TIG welded together. The Boiler is 5.5625" OD throughout. There are two flue configuration options, the .375" OD flue (31) or .500" flue (20).

We ran our American for 5 hours straight pulling 5-6 Adults. We burn coal and NEVER had any flues clog up. The boiler makes plenty of steam all day long.