STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

One of the advantages of running a coal fired boiler was that we never had any problem disposing of the oily waste from engine cleaning. We always kept a small barrel full for occasional boiler lighting but the rest went on to the fires when we were starting the fires up in the morning. People brought confidential papers for us to burn at night when we were burning the beds off before baking up for the night. Old ledgers and papers didn't burn well at all and made a lot of ash. We didn't look forward to doing it. We also burned the occasional dead pet but never less than 4 weeks before flueing because Charlie Sutton said you could still smell them in the flues weeks afterwards.

[Stanley]

Most engineers, and I confess that at times I was one of them, used far too much oil on their engines. It was natural to go round the engine regularly with the oil can, at starting, dinnertime and half way through the morning and afternoon and oil all the small joints not lubricated with lubricators. All this oil had to go somewhere and if you look at this pic of the lad going about his duties at Bancroft you will see a channel cast into the bottom edge of the bed and filled with a twisted rope of soft waste off the tape sizing machines which they cut off when starting a new set of beams. After a few months this was soaked with oil and I used to take it out, burn it on the boiler fires and put fresh clean waste in. This stopped oil getting on to the floor and under the engine beds. Oil under the beds was not a good thing because it mixed with the grit under there and as the beds were always moving slightly when running they eventually became loose as the 'grinding paste' of oil and grit did its damage.
The only place on the engine where proper recycling of oil was possible was on the cranks where there was a shaped tin base in the bed with a drain going down into the cellar where it was collected, filtered and used in the oil can for joints. Any oil flung off by the crank as it revolved was caught on the shield and finished up in the tray below.



Here's the tray, the shield and the drain into the cellar.

[Stanley]

The high pressure cylinder lubricator could be the cause of over oiling. You could adjust them to give whatever feed you desired and the drops of oil following the wire in the water filled sight glasses on their way to the cylinder were a good guide. I used good oil, Walkers Century cylinder oil for saturated steam, the same grade the NCB used in all their winding engines (no point re-inventing the wheel, follow the experts!) and knew that a minimum feed injected directly into the steam flow above the valve via a spoon atomiser was the best way of getting it in there as the steam carried the oil through the whole of the engine. In many installations oil was injected on to the valves in the cylinder and was blown straight through, a very bad way of getting it in there. Newton told me he had heard engines with 'grunting' valves even though high rates of oil flow were used. This was a sure sign that the valves weren't properly lubricated. Excess cylinder oil could lead to oil finding its way into the boiler, a very bad circumstance as it burned onto the tops of the furnace tubes and insulated them against heat transmission, the last thing you wanted....
In contrast, I've seen engines where not enough attention was paid to oil quality and flow and seen the problems that could arise. One in particular broke a piston ring. It paid to take care of this lovely piece of technology. Properly maintained and adjusted it was a good thing!

[Stanley]

One of the most difficult things to lubricate on the engine was the water splashed rods on the air pump.



I eventually found a red waterproof grease that solved the problem but years later found that it had been banned because it was formulated with a chlorinated solvent and these were found to be carcinogens. It just goes to show how you can unwittingly expose yourself to some very nasty substances!

[Stanley]

If you want to find out how something is made, pull it to pieces. A Lancashire boiler doesn't lend itself to this unless you cut it up. You can see the doors at the front to the furnaces and the twin flue tubes down the length of the boiler. All very interesting but what you are looking at here is a disaster. When my friend Robert Aram was fighting to get the Jubilee engine in steam again after the demolition of the old boiler house because English Heritage had omitted to schedule it as part of the Ancient Monument he bought the redundant boiler from Facit Mill on the road down into Rochdale from Bacup. We went to all the trouble to transport it to Jubilee engine house at Padiham and unloaded it in the yard ready for further developments.
I was key holder for the engine house and one day I got a message from the police at Padiham that someone was cutting the boiler up in the yard and did I know anything about it. I said "yes! They're stealing it! Nick them and I'll be there in half an hour." When I got there I felt sorry for the young man who had been doing the cutting, he had been set on by a scrap merchant who supplied the gas and the equipment and the poor lad had been doing a good job until the police turned up. He was totally innocent and I told the police as much. The culprit was of course the scrap man, a large firm in Blackburn, who said he had 'bought the boiler in a pub from a man called Murphy for £300" There was no paperwork.... It took over 12 months for us to bring the matter to a conclusion, I did all the leg work for Robert, but in the end the scrap man had to pay out a very large sum, it was not a profitable move. I can still remember what the police inspector said at Padiham when I said I was baffled as to how an established business man could do something so stupid. "He's a scrap man through and through" was the reply....
So, just because something is on enclosed premises and weighs 30 tons, never assume it is safe!

[Stanley]

Writing that account of the Facit boiler yesterday reminded me of an occasion when I went with John Ingoe to look at two Lancashire boilers in the old Exide Battery works in Death Valley north of Manchester. They were some of the last boilers of their type made by John Thompson's. 'German ended' (heavy forged dome shape ends with no gussets or internal stays) Corrugated furnaces and built for very high pressure, I think it was 250psi working pressure. They were never used for anything but low pressure steam heating, I think they got them cheap because the type was obsolete. They had all their paperwork starting with the build certificates and initial pressure testing right through to the end of the works. They were in excellent condition and were the best boilers I have ever seen. What happened to them? I don't know. There was a big asbestos problem in the factory and it was on a remote site. Extracting them would have been very expensive. I suspect they got cut up for scrap and if so it was a crying shame.....

[Stanley]

I've been rediscovering the old art of generating plane surfaces by metal planing. (See Shed Matters) Doing this reminded me that some engine makers resisted using planers well into the 20th century. Yates and their successors Yates and Thom stuck to big lathes right to the end of engine manufacture. Even the big late engines at Leigh spinners have crosshead slides and tail slides generated on big lathes when almost everyone else had gone onto flat slides generated by planing. They were very effective of course but a curious throw back to the early days. I remember when I was rebuilding the Whitelees Beam Engine at Ellenroad (1842) it was instructive to realise that everything had been done on big lathes. Even the cotters that keyed the segments of the flywheel together were hand made apart from a couple of later replacements almost certainly fitted when the engine was moved from Littleborough to Holroyd's Foundry in Rochdale.
The accracy of the work on the Whitelees was quite astonishing, I was worried about how true the flywheel would run after I rebuilt it but I needn't have worried. The original machining was so good and accurate that it built itself and never needed any adjustment. I love following the old engineers like that, you learn so much about how they worked. (And where they made their mistakes!)

[Stanley]

You occasionally hear people waxing Lyrical about the genius of the 19th century engineers and builders. Much of this is well deserved but you may be surprised at the number of times I found shoddy work or outright mistakes in the engines and buildings I was associated with. The low pressure pedestal housing at Bancroft had been bored wrongly and if you put the slightest pressure on the cap by tightening the holding nuts down, even by hand, you had a hot bearing inside ten minutes.



Buildings were just as bad at times. If you look closely at this section of the Jubilee stack that survived the fall and bear in mind that there were two types of brick, wedge shaped for the headers and curved bricks for the stretchers, you will see that the brickies ignored this and even the elementary rules of coursing during the build. The chimney survived of course so you could say that their cavalier attitude to the rules never did any harm. I saw the same thing in the corner pillars of the Ellenroad Mill when it was being demolished. The brickies built the outer skin correctly using 3" X 1/2" right angled iron reinforcing bands on the corners but then filled the interior by simply dropping bricks in and chucking mortar on top before the next layer! Again, they got it right, the pillars remained intact and plumb.
Note the firebrick liner....

[Stanley]

One interesting fact about the Jubilee chimney. It had been fired at such high temperatures that the flue liner at the base and about twenty feet up had vitrified. In effect the bricks were welded together on the face by glass! When the chimney was cut away at the bottom and propped, Ronnie Goggins fired it when he had cut over half of it out but when the props burned out it didn't fall! The problem was that the liner was far stronger than it would have been normally. Luckily it was a windy day and eventually a particularly strong gust overcame the lining and it came down. Relief all round!

[Stanley]

I've been talking about the advantages of planing machines in other topics. Here's a pic of the LP tail slide on Bancroft engine. Dead simple to make this plane surface for the shoe to run in which supported the tail rod and restrained any forces generated by the bell crank which drove the air pump in the cellar below. The upper restraint was a thick cast iron plate also generated on the planer which made the top bearing surface. The same technique was used on the cross head slide as well. The planing machine came into common use by the mid 19th century but it was surprising how some engine manufacturers stuck to the old practice of boring trunk slides for the crosshead and even the tail slides. It's very instructive when working on old engines to note how they machined the components. Everything was done on the lathe and from the size of some of the components they must have had some big lathes.



The boss of the flywheel on the Whitelees engine was turned on a lathe in 1840! Then it was bored for the shaft and all the spigot holes for the spokes accurately bored as well. You need a big lathe for jobs like this and the standard of accuracy was very good. When I rebuilt the wheel it was dead true with no adjustments needed. The best evidence you could have for the standards they could reach in those days.

[Stanley]

Another thing I have noted many times on old engines is the way the old fitters didn't waste time on finishing surfaces that didn't need it. The casual eye focusses on the bright bits and misses the cast or machined finish an the majority of parts. I follow the same practice when I'm making my small engines, I think that the fashion for overall polishing and painting makes them look artificial and is a waste of time. If it doesn't contribute to the running of the engine, forget it!
A favourite trick was when planing stakes and large cotters, they were given a ridged finish which helped them to bed in the the key ways quicker and gave just as good a result. Another trick was to plane a third of the surface out in the middle deeper than the fitted size. This meant less fitting on the rest of the cotter and didn't affect the fit.

[Stanley]

One question I am often asked by people who have taken the trouble to read some facts up about engines is "What is saturated steam?". Steam that hasn't had any additional heat after leaving the boiler is trying to condense back to water as soon as it enters the main and starts to cool because no insulation is 100% perfect. This means that by the time it reaches the engine it is full of free water. This isn't a problem, it isn't as bad as it sounds but engineers soon realised that if the steam could be passed through additional tubes bathed in hot flue gases before it entered the main the temperature could be raised beyond normal for the pressure and this meant that when it reached the engine it was comparatively dry. 'Superheated steam'. This did raise efficiency slightly but had serious drawbacks.
Saturated steam can act as a sort of lubricant, a small amount of water isn't necessarily bad. The engineers soon found that the normal cylinder oils weren't good enough if used with superheat and more expensive compounds had to be used. Even so, wear rates were higher in cylinders and valves and Newton said he doubted whether, overall, given the extra maintenance, superheat in slow running mill engines ever saved any money. It worked best on locomotives and steam turbines and quite enormous amounts of superheat are routinely used in modern power stations. In some it is high enough to make the steam mains glow red hot!
On the whole I am glad I never had to deal with this complication......

[Stanley]

I look at my time as engineer on the Bancroft engine as one of the most satisfying jobs I ever had. I was like a pig in muck! A big engine to look after and keep me company, usually warm dry and comfortable, and left alone completely by the management as long as the engine was running smoothly and driving the mill. We were always under threat of closure but when it eventually did happen in December 1978 Jim Pollard, the weaving manager, told me that Bancroft made a profit right up to the end. Towards the end of my time, as Newton and I were sat watching the engine running smoothly with a wide open stop valve and only about twenty looms running he told me he had never seen and engine run batter and that it was a pity we were closing because given another year or two he could make me into the best engineer he had ever had on the books. High praise indeed! Is it any wonder I was happy in the job?

[Stanley]

One thing I still don't fully understand is the way working with steam engines gets into your blood! The young fitter that came from the gas board yesterday was amazed when he saw the shed as he came in and fascinated by the fact that I made working steam engines out of what looks like scrap with no drawings. There is a gulf nowadays between technology and the general public but in my day it was all accessible and immediately understandable if your mind worked that way. If you sat watching a steam engine you automatically learned about it but try staring at a smart meter!

[Stanley]

I have nothing but admiration for the thousands of amateur volunteers who keep engines in steam all over the country, they do a wonderful job and it's quite possible that more people see steam engines running today than in the heyday of steam when there was an engine at the foot of almost every chimney. I remember when I first saw the farm buildings at Lurdenlaw near Kelso in the days when I knew nothing about steam but there was a chimney poking out of the middle of them. Jim Baird, the farmer, told me they used to have a steam engine to drive all the barn machinery and this was news to me.
What many of these volunteers don't realise is that their greatest friend is wear in the cylinder bores of their engines. When working hard and at higher pressures the engines ran much hotter and once warmed up, condensation in the cylinders was not a problem, the exhaust was hot enough to keep them dry. Condensation due to this reason is a big problem with old engines but if the bores are worn they are safe, the engine can cope better with water because it can escape past the piston on compression at the end of the stroke. With a bit of luck this pumping keeps the water mobile as droplets and it can escape with the exhaust.
When I was advising Wigan Metropolitan authority on the Trencherfield engine they got an expert in who advised them to rebore the cylinders to get better efficiency. I warned them in the strongest possible terms not to attempt this but at that point they dispensed with my services and I do not know if they ever proceeded.

[Stanley]

One peculiar thing I found out after I left engines I had helped to bring back to life is that you aren't necessarily flavour of the month when you go back for a visit. I think this is because they get the feeling you are inspecting their efforts and sometimes, if they find a fault you get the blame for it! It was obviously some mistake you made when you were in charge. No joke, I have been attacked many a time publicly but always tell them the same thing, nobody is perfect and of course I made mistakes. The point is that the engines are running over twenty years after I walked away from them, they have to accept responsibility themselves. At one point they were considering re-boring the Whitelees cylinder at Ellenroad and I told them that if it was me I'd leave it alone. Yes, it's worn but it's running safely and dealing with the condensate. If they look at the entablature beam they will find it is broken in two and repaired with massive iron plates. That was almost certainly caused by condensate forming a slug in the bottom of the cylinder and happened while it was at Littleborough. My 'cure' was to corset the beam with large girders. It's as safe as houses! Why do anything to alter it?

[Stanley]

One surprising fact about steam plant in mills is that there were no official qualifications or even training for persons in charge of the most dangerous part of the mill. Certification for marine engineers was very strict and the qualification was highly prized. In contrast running a similar plant on land was an amateur affair and needed no qualification. It was a job often passed on from father to son and the quality of engineers varied enormously. There were some very good ones but also some duck eggs! When I took over at Bancroft I had no qualifications at all!
In the late 19th century, after a series of accidents, a Bill was presented to Parliament; '(60 Vict) Steam engines and boilers. Persons in charge.' on 12 July 1897. However the Houses adjourned early because of a visit by foreign royalty,the Bill was dropped and never came before Parliament again. It was a Bill to grant certificates to persons in charge of steam engines and boilers on land along the same lines as the existing Marine Certificates administered by the Board of Trade. There were to be two classes; First Class for anyone in charge of a boiler or engine bigger than 5HP and winding engines of any size. Second Class was for all other boilers and engines except those in agriculture and the Queen's Service.
So mill engineers missed the chance of achieving the same status as Marine Engineers.

[Stanley]

We have plenty of evidence that the engine tenters were mill aristocracy. There was an hierarchy in the mill and the tacklers and the engineer were always top of the heap. because the engineers worked alone they were a law unto themselves. Newton tells me that they had their own corner in the Commercial Inn and woe betide anyone who sat there! If you read the minute books of the Calf Hall Shed Company you can get a very good picture of them. Some, like Albert Hoggarth were shareholders and as long as they kept their nose clean and ran the engine efficiently they were given a free hand and listened to by the directors. Part of this was because they were responsible for the discipline of the mill as they controlled starting time and this affected everyone. Engine house time was taken from Railway time according to the Manchester Man's watch. Sometimes this was in advance of Post Office time which was where the workers got the information to set their watches and clocks and at one point there was such a difference that it was raised in a board meeting of the CHSC who had to instruct the engineer to run to Post Office time as the workers were complaining. At the same time he was also told to desist from hitting coal carters with a shovel..... I think you get the picture.



Master of all he surveyed.... Hoggarth at Butts in about 1890.

[Stanley]

Newton told a good story about the engineers sitting in the pub discussing engines they had run. One said that he had run an engine that was so big the oil holes had handrails round them to stop you falling in......

[Stanley]

Something like this at Glasshouses Mill? Now that would be a big engine!

[Stanley]

There were dozens of oil holes on the Bancroft engine and I want round them all morning, noon and night and half way through the morning and afternoon. Not really necessary to do them so often but oil use was minimal and what doing it meant was that all the moving parts were getting close visual inspection each time you went to them, far outweighed the cost of the oil! The same applies to cleaning, rubbing an engine down regularly with oily waste gives a nice finish eventually and each time you do it you are inspecting the engine. Funnily enough, if you've read Zen and the Art Of Motorcycling by Pirsig you'll find he says exactly the same thing about his bike.....

[Stanley]

One of my most satisfying moments in the engine house was in the days when we had regular power cuts (we shall have them again!). They didn't affect us of course because we had a big alternator and made all our own leccy once we were running. In the dark, the shed was an island of light in the gloom and there were letters to the local paper querying why Bancroft was favoured over everyone else. Worth noting that Rolls had a dedicated leccy supply from Keighley and they were never switched off to my knowledge.
I always thought it was slightly unfair that we were not given any monetary recompense for being independent and reducing the load on the grid. If you had gas fired boilers but maintained a separate 28sec oils supply so that when supplies were low you could be requested to switch to oil you got what was known as a Dual Fuel Allowance which was a rebate on the normal price of all the gas you burned. We got nothing... we just soldiered on.
One exception was when the Three Day Week was brought in, we were not allowed to run five days even though we were not a drain on resources. There was a get-out, if you were weaving medical cloths like Johnson and Johnson you could work five days. We put some looms on gauze on commission from Johnson's but the ploy didn't work.

[Stanley]

When I took over in the engine house and had been assessed by the work force they evidently decided I was one of the good guys. Weavers would come in for a cup of tea and sympathy if they were having a bad morning. Jim Pollard, the weaving manager used to come in and patiently answer my questions about the mechanics of running the mill, what was actually going on. Frank Bleasdale, the Winding Master used to cut my hair while the engine was running.... A lovely place to work!



Daniel Meadows pic of Frank cutting my hair on the Low Pressure side of the engine....

[Stanley]

Being one of the last engines still running we got many visitors and they were a good distraction during the day, I enjoyed having them on the whole. It was interesting how women especially, though dragged in by their husbands usually, saw the beauty of the engine more than the men. The strangest visitor I ever had was a man who worked for Trinity House who did 8mm movies of the engine. What struck me was that he was a dead ringer for Christie the mass murderer!



The Trinity House man in 1977 in the engine house. he told me that the internal joke was that it was called Trinity House because all the paperwork had to be done in triplicate!

[Stanley]

This young lad took a fancy to the bed nut spanner. He couldn't believe how big it was. I'll bet he still remembers it! The engine was a great tool for firing up young engineers! I was always conscious of this and told them that when they started doing physics at school to remember the engine because it was the best example of physics in action they would ever see!