STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

Fitting the linkage before indicating. Once it was on it was no problem leaving it attached and working throughout that session of running.

[Stanley]

Once the indicator was hooked up to the cord it replicated the stroke of the engine. The hard bronze needle of the indicator, controlled by the steam pressure, transferred the reading to special 'metallic' paper fixed to the indicator drum. This was a mildly abrasive paper that picked up a trace from the bronze point. This pointer was normally clear of the paper and to take a reading you lowered it onto the paper until a visible trace appeared and then lifted it off. The paper was then taken off the drum and the trace interpreted.

[Stanley]

One of the three Dobbie McInnes indicators I have. Beautifully made and in a fitted mahogany box they were the engineer's pride and joy. Newton persuaded one of the old engineers to sell me his for a tenner after he retired. I have an idea it was Mr Marshall who ran Wellhouse at the end.

[Stanley]

A typical indicator diagram, time against pressure, this one taken by the insurance company during an annual survey of the engine.

[Stanley]

Indicator diagrams look fine and are very useful for flagging up faults in valves and timing but more tripe has been written about indicating that perhaps anything else connected with steam engines. To the theorists they look wonderful because they give a 'scientific' picture of what is happening in the otherwise inaccessible cylinder. I did them as a check but paid a lot more attention to how smoothly the ropes were running, what my old stethoscope which Dr Pickard gave me told me about the cylinders and reports of production from the shed. My old friend Billy (Two Rivers) Lambert who was an ex tackler who wove in the shed was my indicator of optimum speed and Jim Pollard gave me the loom efficiency figures. Jim told me at one point I was very popular with the weavers as I had raised the average wage by almost £2 a week, this when a top weaver could perhaps make £40 in a full week, so I was getting something right!



Billy Lambert. What he didn't know about looms and weaving wasn't worth knowing.

[Stanley]

I used to go in the shed about half an hour after starting and Billy would signal how the loom speed was. This varied from day to day because of the effects of humidity in the shed on the leather belts. I followed his instructions and went in later when I got the thumbs up from Billy. Tiny alterations but they made all the difference to production in the shed.

[Stanley]

It always puzzled me why the management didn't take as much care as they could have done to ensure the best weaving conditions in the shed. They understood the need for optimum loom speeds to maximise production but left it to me and Jon Pollard, the weaving manager, to do what we could with no support. A rev. counter on the lineshaft would have helped! Look at this pic of the engine at Sutcliffe and Clarkson, Oakmount Mill, Burnley. You can see on the railing just to the left of the flywheel a rev. counter.

[Stanley]

Newton reckoned I was beginning to be a fair engine tenter when we finished.... If that's true it's because I kept my mind on the job and had strict routines designed to protect me against mishaps like dry bearings. Once you had an engine settled down that's really all that was needed, constant attention to lubrication and using your senses. I know it sounds far fetched but I knew if a lubricator had blocked as soon as it happened. All I can surmise is that my brain had picked up something that was beyond my normal senses. Years after I cam out of the engine house someone commented that I was nervous when I jumped at an unfamiliar sound. I told him that he was wrong, I just had very fast reactions. I remember telling Newton and he agreed with me, he was the same, any strange noise immediately alerted him. As I get older I am sure my hearing is deteriorating but I still pick up immediately on any sound like the letter box being used. Very strange...... My own theory is that it is awareness of vibrations rather than pure sound.
Not sure what brought that on!

[Stanley]

Waiting for bad vibrations. We had only had three hours sleep the night before and I can assure you that the slightest change in anything woke me up!

[Stanley]

Joan Smith did this pic of me running Ellenroad. Fully alert despite appearances!

[Stanley]

In the days when most of the mill engines were built lubrication was not top of the agenda with many manufacturers. I have always suspected that this was pertly due to them not being particularly worried if Cylinders wore and needed replacing as it was more business for them. In many cases it was simply one shot tallow lubrication directly into the bore. As time went on and people like Kirkham at Bolton made reliable high pressure lubricators the mill engineers accepted them and often installed a multiplicity of feeds to different parts of the cylinder, many of them quite useless. Fir instance oil injected into a valve was blown straight into the cylinder. A lot of this was because cylinder oil itself was so little understood, the thicker the better was the general rule.
During the early part of the 20th century things gradually improved. Companies like the Vacuum Oil Company mad proper studies of oils and the means of delivering them. In 1926 they produced a detailed report for Bancroft engine (no doubt a free service for sales purposes). I have that report and one of their recommendations was to inject the oil into the main steam pipe above the stop valve via a slotted spoon, the flow of steam atomised the oil and anywhere the steam went it carried the oil with it. Nobody heeded it....



I talked to Newton about this when we went onto Walkers Century oil, a deceptively thin but very effective lubricant and showed him the report. He made me an atomiser head and we drilled the main steam pipe and installed it above the stop valve. I put two of the feeds from the Kirkham lubricator on it and the effects were instantaneous. The engine ran quieter, needed less oil and from the evidence, cleaned many parts of the interior that had never had an adequate supply of oil. This almost fifty years after the report.....

[Gadge]

Very interesting post, Stanley.

I've encountered a similar situation, with regard to injection of corrosion inhibitor [CI] chemicals into natural gas streams, in offshore oil and gas production.
The CI has to be injected into a turbulent flow region of the gas stream, to get it to disperse as droplets. So it has to be fed into the centre of the pipe, via an 'injection quill', rather than just dribbled along the pipe wall. Curiously enough, liquid CI is a corrosion promoter, if it runs as a dribble along a gas pipe wall!

We had some serious pipe wall thickness losses to repair, in the Bass Strait oil/gas fields, when this issue was first realised; after my then employer took on the Oilfield Chemical Management role contract for Exxon Mobil Australia, in the early '2000's.

[Stanley]

Interesting Doug. Very similar problems in the use of CI chemicals in steam lines. Funnily enough, long steam pipe runs in factories that had a steam engine seemed to have a natural protection and I always put this down to the minute amounts of oil carried over into the boiler and vaporised with the water. A sort of accidental CI system. The leakage problems we had were always on bends where water hammer was creating corrosion cells. (Now there's another interesting field!)

[plaques]

The leakage problems we had were always on bends

My experience of water flow through pipes was limited to Bernoulli calculations. He got round these problems of flow round bends by giving it a 'coefficient of discharge'. A catch all phrase that said something is going on to reduce the flow rate. I always thought this was down to increased friction or perhaps a venturi effect. Cavitation from the Euler effect never crossed my mind. Euler. Very interesting proposition. I'll leave it to you to get your slide rule out.

[Stanley]

When my dad worked for Armstrong Whitworth at Trafford Park he was involved in two projects connected with fluid flows. One was making the propellers for Captain Seagrave's record attempt, they were trying to minimise cavitation. The other was testing different designs of pipe bend for flow efficiency. He said that they were all surprised to discover that if anything, a square 'bend' gave slightly better results than a smooth curve. They put it down to turbulence caused by the difference in flow path between the outside of the bend and the inner surface. It almost seemed to be that the fluid bounced off the square bend into its new path.

[Stanley]

Thinking about fluid flows.... One of the greatest improvements to waterwheels was the introduction of the ventilated bucket. It was noted that when a large wheel was running at maximum speed the buckets weren't completely filled because the 'slab' of water falling in compressed the air in the bucket and as it escaped it blew much of the water out. This was cured by leaving the back of the bucket open to allow the air to escape. Generally credited to Fairbairn but there is a school of thought that believes that the first man to use ventilated buckets was Hewes of Manchester. The man who built the large suspension wheel for Quarry Bank at Styal.

[Stanley]

The Glasshouses wheel which had ventilated buckets. These are heavily corroded but you can see them curving away to the vent at the back.

[Stanley]

It's worth noting that modern suspension wheels like this one were still being built and installed beyond the mid 19th century when the steam engine was king. If you had a good water resource it was still economic to use it, indeed, it would be economic today with our high energy prices. You only have to look at modern hydro electric power.....

[Stanley]

When I was investigating water power in the Lake District I was surprised by the number of water power plants, completely intact, that were laid idle due to the stupid provisions of the rivers legislation which made it mandatory for owners to pay the authorities for borrowing their water for a few minutes. This was eventually repealed in 1991 and the water use made free. I often wonder how many of the sites were used again....



This was the fate of many I'm afraid. Such a waste.

[Stanley]

I found this discarded Gilkes turbine in the Kirkstone Quarry of Lakeland Stone. It had been replaced with this....



...when the licence fee for extracting water was applied. I suggested to English Heritage that they could use it at Stott Park Bobbin Mill but nothing was ever done.

[Stanley]

The Diesel powered this alternator.

[Stanley]

The forty foot diameter wheel at Lothersdale Mill. Still there in situ and one of the largest waterwheels in Britain. Definitely a forgotten corner.....

[Stanley]

Newton once told me that the Lothersdale wheel was most likely made by a firm at Cowling and would be first 'erected' lying flat on the ground to make sure all the arts fitted properly, then transported piecemeal to Lothersdale and final erection in the confined wheelhouse. The heaviest component would be the wrought iron axle and cast iron gearing.

[plaques]

I thought that the Laxey wheel in the IOM at 72 ft diameter was one of the biggest. Laxey Wheel.

[Stanley]

It is P but at 40ft the Lothersdale wheel is also one of the biggest.



This was probably the biggest ever built. The wheel at the Troy Nail Works at Burden, NY State in the US. You can find it on the Net.....