Back to the future 3" scale

[Loco112]

Skip to 8 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KjETrY8Z48

Jack Sessums equipment?

[Steam Engine Dan]

yup jack's work alright . jack was great at what he did. I never met him, but learned a lot about his work. here is some rare behind the scenes of his work on my childhood show the adventure's of brisco county jr. Jack built a Sierra #3 just for this project and the trestle shown was about 12 feet tall, all at 1" scale. For the derailment scene near the cliff, Jack had the train follow a steel tray under the dirt. He also had padding at the bottom of the cliff, in case the train didn't stop at it's edge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGA1OGx2BW4

note how they light the smoke unit, take the stack off and then light the wick with a blow torch and put the stack back on.

[paralleler]

Fantastic!!! I just subscribed to Jack's YouTube channel from Steam Engine Dan's link. Thanks very much to both of you for the heads-up on this!

[Steam Engine Dan]

Fantastic!!! I just subscribed to Jack's YouTube channel from Steam Engine Dan's link. Thanks very much to both of you for the heads-up on this!

you're welcome he even did a commentary fire up video on the one surviving locomotive that starred in the greatest show on earth from 1952.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipbPLlU5rno

[Terr1bleone]

Great videos, I noticed in this one
https://youtu.be/ipbPLlU5rno
he uses an airline through the blowdown valve while seeming to also fire it. Is this something that can be done without special modifications to the boiler? -Mike

[jcbrock]

he uses an airline through the blowdown valve while seeming to also fire it. Is this something that can be done without special modifications to the boiler? -Mike

You need to thread the blowdown valve outlet to hold the air line but that's it. Because this is an oil burner you need to have air or steam to the turret to run the atomizer until you can cut over to steam manufactured by the boiler. This is one way to do it. Some will recommend against it due to the amount of oxygen it puts into the boiler water. Another way, assuming the turret has a shutoff between it and the boiler, is to add a valve on the atomizer line to provide air during fireup. You shut the turret off, hook the air to the atomizer line, and use that to fire until ready to cut over.

I am really glad these videos are available, especially the cab ride around Jack's track. I'd met him and heard it was fantastic, but never got to see it. He was able to get so much done!

[Soot n' Cinders]

Oxygenating the boiler water isn’t good. It probably won’t hurt things too much as little as our boilers run, but that free oxygen in the water will attack the steel until it is boiled off and vented. The other concern would be if you get to talking too much, the pressure in the boiler could climb over the pressure in the air line and feed scalding water back into the air system. I’ve seen it done on an oil burner that had air on the manifold, the guy opened the steam valve without closing the air valve and blew up the hose from the heat.
The best system I’ve seen with oil was two check valves feeding into the atomizer valve, one from the manifold and one from the air connection. That way you can’t feed air into the boiler, and the boiler will automatically change over to steam once the steam pressure exceeds the air pressure. That also has an added benefit of allowing some condensation as the lines warm up without killing the fire.

[James Powell]

Atomizing steam vs Air...on the ship, we used steam to run (well, duh!), but air to start. We needed at least 7.5 hp(e) of air to light one fire- there were 2, 7.5 hp(e) air compressors, and you would have one running full time and the other on and off when you were on air.

Valve system had checks to reduce the risk of getting steam in the air line- I can't remember _that_ being a failure point, but there were also globe valves too. Might as well have always anticipated loosing the fire due to water when you switched from air to steam, as about 95% of the time that's what would happen. 50-150 PSI regulated steam pressure (sort of...), and all she'd suffer for air. Ship Service Air was 225 PSI, as originally the diesel generators were air start...thank goodness, they had been replaced LONG before I came around- it only took from 1967-1984/5 for the RCN to label them as complete dogs and replace the Deutz engines with electric start DD 149-12 NA's.

James

[Terr1bleone]

Thank you to of your answers, they were very through. I guess I should have included my questions were more pertaining to if I could do this with a coal fired locomotive, to use the blower instead of a small exhaust fan. I have seen engines that use compressed air for this but, I always assumed it was plumbed into the blower, not boiler. -Mike

[Soot n' Cinders]

Thank you to of your answers, they were very through. I guess I should have included my questions were more pertaining to if I could do this with a coal fired locomotive, to use the blower instead of a small exhaust fan. I have seen engines that use compressed air for this but, I always assumed it was plumbed into the blower, not boiler. -Mike

Mine has an air fitting tapped into the blower line. I would avoid pressurizing the boiler with air if you could.

[Pontiacguy1]

I have rebuilt a locomotive that had air plumbed directly into the boiler and then used the blower to fire it up. That boiler, incidentally, was the reason why the locomotive no longer ran. It was in terrible shape, but it never got cleaned out or maintained in any way. When I fixed it back, I fixed it like I do all of my locomotives, with a valve and a tee into the blower line so that I can put air straight through the blower without it going into the boiler. I have used this on all my steamers and much prefer it to dropping a fan into the stack. That's just my preferred way of drafting the fire on startup, so others will definitely disagree.