STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

I don't think it will surprise any of you to know that I have both of these (and others!) in the treasure chest....
Remember these two?



In my experience, the best high pressure automatic lubricators ever made.

[Stanley]

Budenberg was another name we relied on. They made the best pressure gauges and this is their standard test gauge, a very accurate gauge for testing working gauges against. Their factory at Broadheath near Altrincham was in many ways old fashioned but they made wonderful gauges. They are no more in that form, cheap imports forced them out of business. The name still exists.... LINK

[Stanley]

Hopkinsons at Huddersfield made the very best boiler fittings. Many other firms tried to compete but never overtook the Huddersfield firm. They made many of the major innovations in the early years and their valves in particular were wonderful. Even today, a reconditioned Hopkinson valve beats all the modern equivalents. Unfortunately the modern world is more interested in price than quality and they, like many other firms, fell victim to cheap imports. They are part of the Weir pumps conglomerate now and still technically in business but the glory days are gone.



Their catalogue is a delight. I have an old one and often refer to it.

[Stanley]

I'm on with making flywheels for my next two engines in the shed at the moment and it got me to thinking about built-up flywheels. When I first took Bancroft engine on I was at first intrigued and as the days went on, annoyed, by the fact that when I was starting and stopping the engine the flywheel rattled like a large child's toy at slow speed. As soon as I had bottomed what I saw as the urgent tasks I took some of the wind boarding off the wheel and got a look inside. I found that the rattling noise was loose nuts lying in the interior which at low speed dropped down as the wheel turned. Many of them had been doing this for years as they were worn round. Further investigation showed that they had come loose and dropped off the fastening bolts they were supposed to be retaining! Luckily there were still enough hanging on to maintain the wheel's integrity but over a couple of weeks I replaced them all and made sure that the others were tight. I can't express how rewarding this was. Apart from me being sure about the integrity of the wheel I got rid of that annoying rattle. It was a valuable lesson that if something is annoying you as the engine runs there is always a reason for it and many a time it's something giving notice of an incipient problem. The moral is that if something natters you, fix it! In the end it's good maintenance.

[Stanley]

There was another noise on the Bancroft engine that had been nattering engineers for years. It was a serious thump somewhere in the low pressure side and was attributed to water hammer in the air pump caused by bad design. There was no doubt that it was true the air pump was bad, Roberts had incorporated air chambers in the side to cushion the stroke but they had never been any good. So, I accepted what everyone told me and put up with the thump until one day I was walking down the low pressure side while the engine was stopped with a lump hammer in my hand and noticed that the cotter between the piston rod and the crosshead was bleeding bright red oxide. This is a sure sign that something is loose so I clouted the cotter. It went in almost 1/2"! So I clouted it again and when I restarted the engine the Bancroft thump had vanished but gradually reappeared during the afternoon as the cotter worked loose again.
When the engine stopped that evening I drove the cotter out and had a look at it.



Here are both the HP and LP cotters, both worn but if you look carefully at the biggest one (the LP) nearest the camera you will see that there is a depression worn in the face of it. I got Newton up, he took particulars of both cotters and we replaced them. At weekend Newton came up with the replacement cotters and we installed them together with a thick spacer washer for the spigot on the LP piston rod end because we reckoned that the old fitters had made a mistake and the spigot was bottoming in the crosshead before the cotter had properly got hold. This meant that we had altered the stroke of the LP piston by 1/4" so we ran the engine to check we weren't hitting the back cover. It was perfect, ran like a rice pudding and we had cured the Bancroft thump! It just goes to show, never assume that all the old fitters were perfect, the fault had been there for 60 years and had got worse over time as the hammering deformed the cotter. It never came loose again as long as I was running it....

[Stanley]

Sometimes you got a new noise. One day I noticed a grunt in the HP cylinder, once a stroke and it was so bad you could feel the floor vibrate. So I gave it a good dose of oil with the Lunkenheimer and rang Newton. As he came through the engine house door I could see he was about to say "What's up?" but before he could get the words out he got the grunt, he was immediately all attention. After a while we decided that there was something but neither of us knew what it was so I carried on running but increased the oil feed and at teatime when I stopped Newt and I took the front cover off. We did that one because it had a slight weep on the packing and it was a good opportunity to cure that as well.



Daniel turned up and did this pic. We soon found what the cause of the grunt was. There was a patch of rust on the bore which we reckoned was caused by steam from the warmer getting through the gap in the rings and as I always stopped the engine in the starting position it was always in the same place and had washed the oil out of the porous cast iron. It was made worse because we were on a three day week at the time so the engine was in the same position for four days straight. We rubbed the patch off with emery and after that I let the engine stop wherever it wanted to and adjusted it the following morning with the barring engine or starting from the LP. It proved that a slight change in routine could have unintended consequences.

[Stanley]

I've mentioned elsewhere how I managed to get the management to change to more expensive Walker's Century cylinder oil when I realised that the oil being used wasn't lubricating oil at all, it was core oil used in foundries. As I gained experience I realised how hampered the old engineers were before the advent of cheap mineral oils by having to use tallow for cylinder lubrication and castor oil for high duty applications like the flywheel shaft bearings. At Ellenroad you can still see the congealed castor oil on the foundations below the flywheel. Modern oils were specially formulated and very sophisticated. When I was running Ellenroad I persuaded Walkers to give us the oil for the engine and when that source dried up and Coates Inks was taken over by Total Oils I asked them to formulate a cylinder oil for us. They came up trumps and made it a big advertising feature for their oils but I found out much later that they had gone to Walkers for the oil and paid them to manufacture it for them.... At one time Walkers supplied the NCB with all their oils and as many steam winders were still running this was what persuaded me to go to them in the first place while I was at Bancroft.
I used the same principle when I was looking for the best source of chemicals for boiler water treatment. I asked the NCB who supplied their chemicals and they pointed me at a Manchester firm owned and run by Charlie Southwell who always came personally to Bancroft and taught me how to analyse the water to decide treatment levels. We had a clean boiler!



Charlie keeping an eye on our feed water at Bancroft. A good man and he sold good water treatment!
By the way, Charlie had a Mazda car with a rotary engine. The only one I ever saw. I was impressed!

[Stanley]

I always remember what an old engineer once told me about oil.... "There's only two sorts, thick and thin!"
Basically he was right.... As a matter of interest, 'clock oil' is one of the thinnest and purest lubricating oils in use today. I suppose there is a modern oil now but the way it was always made was to boil pure Neat's Foot Oil and put it in clear bottles in direct daylight. The Ultra Violent acted on the oil and a sediment collected at the bottom of the bottle. After a long exposure, the clear oil was decanted off and put through the same process. This was done until a very clear oil could be bottled and kept in the dark in coloured bottles. Mine is in a polythene flask protected with black insulting tape...

[Stanley]

If you look carefully at the side of the Bancroft LP cylinder you'll see a brass lubricator with a globe shaped body between the two cylinder relief valves. This is an old fashioned tallow lubricator which could also be used for cylinder oil. If you isolated it with the cock at the bottom you could unscrew the top and fill it with melted tallow, seal it again and open the cock. The theory was that the heat of the cylinder encouraged the tallow to slowly drain into the bore where by hit and miss, it lubricated the bore. Surprising really that it was fitted to an engine in 1920 and soon superseded by fitting an automatic cylinder lubricator driven by a ratchet operate by the valve linkage.
In practice lubrication wasn't needed on the LP once I had fitted an atomiser in the main steam pipe on the HP cylinder. The oil was atomised by the steam and even when it got to the LP the steam was still loaded with oil. I used to activate the LP lubricator just before stopping to make sure the LP had a dose of oil for the night.

[Stanley]

There were more different designs of oilers than you can poke a stick at. Perhaps the most common was the simple oil cup with a wick that gradually delivered the oil to the central tube and down to the bearing by capillary attraction. Here's the biggest one I ever came across, made by Kirkham's of Bolton it lives in one of my treasure chests.





The wick in this one is a pipe cleaner that would serve perfectly well but the classic wick was a bunch of worsted threads finished with a copper wire tail for insertion in the central tube.

[Stanley]

Lubrication was not seen as a biggie in the early days. If you read Fairbairn's monumental work on millwork and gearing there are only two paragraphs on lubrication.

[Stanley]

One of the most important elements of steam engines is bearing technology, closely related to lubrication of course. It was the pressure of innovation in the provision of power that led to the virtual perfection of bronze bearing technology and the surprising fact is that the modern science of Tribology is such a recent development. Despite many innovations the standard solution to keeping a rotating shaft cool in a bearing over long periods is still the bronze bearing. Roller and ball bearings have their place but in the largest applications under the heaviest loads the plain bearing is still king. Look at the big ends in a modern engine of you don't believe me.....

[Stanley]

The last big bronze bearings I had anything to do with. Two replacement bearing shells for the bottom halves of the flywheel bearings on the Jubilee engine (the extra bearing is one of the originals which was used to make the mould for the new ones). Cast by dick Bonser at the Lilley Injector Works at Rochdale just before it closed. Dick was an expert on bronze and cast all my bearings for me. It was the last job the foundry did. Terry Gissing and I picked them up and they were machined at Gissing and Lonsdale's at Havre Park.

[Tizer]

The start-stop technology used in the latest motor cars has only been made possible by improvements in lubricants and bearings. When first introduced into production models in the 1980s it led to short crankshaft life due to the greater amount of time spent spinning in a metal-to-metal state without lubrication. An accout is given in this Autocar article: LINK

[Stanley]

Whenever possible I always let the engine tick over light for a few seconds after starting to allow the oil time enough to circulate especially on a big diesel. The last bearings to get oil on an engine are the rockers which get the overflow from the camshaft and you'd be surprised how long it takes to get up there after a long period stood still. Beryl Harrison always parked Billy's Cresta with its nose downhill so that it didn't spoil the look of their house at Thornton and Billy always blamed the failure of the rear end bearing on the crankshaft on that, it drained dry during the night.

[Stanley]

We had a similar process on steam engines. The ordinary oil lubricators were always topped up and tuned on at least ten minutes before starting so as to make sure there was an initial dose when the bearing started moving. The aquarium feeds on the second motion shaft and the flywheel shaft were turned on immediately before starting as they delivered a lot of oil and if the pump wasn't operating it didn't get recirculated and overflowed out of the bottom reservoir. The intention was that every bearing was flooded with oil before the engine started to move. If you did this regularly and the bearings were properly installed and adjusted a bronze bearing has virtually unlimited life as the metal of the shaft never touches the bearing, it's running on top of a film of oil.

[Stanley]

Conversely, a small wrong adjustment to the play in a bearing could lead to overheating and melting the face of the bearing almost immediately. If you didn't leave room for the oil you were in serious trouble especially in a bearing carrying a lot of weight. I once had molten bronze running out of a small bearing on Ellenroad engine after a volunteer tightened up what they thought was a loose bearing. Harsh words had to be spoken but the culprit never admitted his fault. Mind you, he didn't do it again!

[Stanley]

The old engineers had an emergency cure for a hot neck, Victory Compound. If you could cool the bearing and keep it running you mixed some of this compound with very thin oil and flooded the damaged bearing with it as it ran. The compound works because it is a very soft abrasive, softer than both the metals in the bearing and so doesn't embed itself in the working surfaces. Lapping compound works on the same principle. After the bearing had run for a while and polished the rags of both the shaft and the bearing metal, it was flushed out with paraffin and then thin oil and after a while re-adjusted. It wasn't pretty but it kept you going and often the bearing needed no further attention. Newton reckoned that powdered rotten brick did the same job and indeed used it on at least one occasion on a hot bearing on this shaft.



It's the shaft from the old waterwheel at County Brook Mill. If you look carefully at the right hand journal (click to enlarge) you'll see that it is badly roped, grooves worn in it because of lack of lubrication. When he and Jim Fort fitted a new bearing it ran hot when they restarted the wheel even though it was well lubricated. This was because the roped surface was cutting through the oil and increasing friction in the bearing. It was smoking hot even though water from the wheel was splashing over it. Newton found a brick, hammered it into a coarse powder and infused it into the bearing. He said it squealed like a wounded beast for a while but they kept putting oil in it and it eventually settled down. They re-adjusted it and it ran till the wheel was scrapped.
If the treated bearing didn't settle down and gave trouble you could always strip it down and reface the journal and fit a new bearing. The advantage of the Victory Compound was that it enabled you to keep the mill running even though you were in serious trouble.

[Stanley]

When Big Harry was killed in a plane crash in 2003 I helped Janet gather evidence for the inquest and one of the men I spoke to was a man called Doctor Rob Dwyer Joyce who is professor of tribology at Sheffield University. Harry's death was caused by the failure of a bronze bearing in a fuel pump and he was very helpful. One thing I asked him was how you pronounced 'tribology', was it like tribune or tribe. He told me it was tribe and the reason he knew was that he was a member of the committee that decided on the new name for the science of lubrication. Straight from the horse's mouth!

[Stanley]

The LP pedestal bearing at Bancroft was defective in that they had forgotten to bore the cap out slightly off centre. The holding down bolts you can see the the lock-nuts on top were only finger tight. If you nipped them down the slightest amount you'd be stopped in ten minutes with a hot bearing. The old fitters didn't always get it right!

[Stanley]

Newton warned me about the fault on the pedestal and one day, being of an enquiring mind I tightened the lock nuts with my fingers. Within three minutes I was back with the spanner loosening the nuts and flooding the bearing with oil. I got away with it by the skin of my teeth! Another minute and I would have had to stop.

[Stanley]

I'm reminded of something that Newton once said on the subject of bearings. "I'd rather hear them than smell them".

[Tripps]

I'm reminded of something that Newton once said on the subject of bearings. "I'd rather hear them than smell them".

Great quote - I think it applies to babies as well.

[PanBiker]

I'm reminded of something that Newton once said on the subject of bearings. "I'd rather hear them than smell them".

Great quote - I think it applies to babies as well.

At 3am I don't think either end makes a difference!

[Stanley]

I've only once ever had a really hot neck on an engine, a small one at Ellenroad and it was spraying molten bronze out of the ends of the bush. Thankfully it was only a small one and not critical but I could just imagine the trouble it would cause if it was a big one!