The Home Machinist!

Thanks to Anthony Duarte of Eccentric Engineer (www.eccentricengineer.com) for rebuilding two Riverside & Great Northern Railway's 3/8" Penberthy injectors. It was actually an upgrading with 954 bronze nozzles and a new bottom cap. Now the injectors reliably pick up water with as little as 40 psi. The price was very reasonable, communication fantastic, and the turnaround time was less than two weeks. - Jim Schulz, member of the R&GN board of directors www.dellstrain.com

Thank you for the shoutout Jim!

The two major design improvements are the hex in the combining cone (no special tools required to remove it), and the bottom cap. On a Penberthy, the lower cap has a thin wall that shrouds the delivery cone and is designed to be crushed the first time it's tightened in, effectively destroying it. I made a lower cap that's much more rigid and uses an O-ring that compresses firmly against the delivery cone. If it ever wears or fails, it's an off-the-shelf item.

This service is available to anyone with a troublesome Penberthy, but please note this is a retrofit, and these components are not individually swapable with Penberthy cones. If you're interested in having a Penberthy rebuilt, I need the body in-hand to make sure everything will fit properly; seems no two Penberthys are the same.

Anthony

It seems that injectors were custom builds at the factory long ago. Some guy had a rack full of parts and hand picked the parts that best fit together when building up a new injector. I thought the custom fit situation was just with Nathan Monitor style injectors. Now I find that Anthony has revealed the same issues with Penberthy products. Each time I make new Monitor injector parts, they are a custom fit to the intended injector and may not fit the other Monitor injectors I have to deal with.

With many years of wear and no new castings, often times the surrounding parts have to be modified to compensate for castings that are no longer to be found or well worn and still serviceable. The next time you visit a museum tourist operation with a full size steamer in operation, you can be sure that the resident machinist has put some unseen effort into the injectors just to allow the locomotive to be operable.