STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

As I have said so many times, Newton Pickles was a good man for me. He was an encyclopaedia on machining, steam engines and waterwheels. The nice thing was that he was absolutely open and answered all my questions. Any expertise I have is almost solely down to him. He was also open to new things, I remember how intently he listened to my explanation of nano technology and the implications of quantum physics at that scale. I showed him Loctite Shaftlock glue and he immediately started using it for fixing the driving wheels on his loco. I always remember one trip we took together and all of a sudden he said "The trouble today is that there aren't enough people making things" I've never heard it put as simply or accurately than that. That was 30 years ago but it is even more true today.
He was eighty when he died suddenly and was active in his shed right up to the end.... Now there's a thought for a bloke who is 80 a week on Sunday....

[Stanley]

During the inter war years many mills installed alternators for lighting and some power to later machinery with individual electric motors. This was the alternator installed at Wellhouse and wasn't done by Brown and Pickles but a local electrical company. The first time it was tested at had a dead short due to exposed bus bars and when the exciter was powered up to draw power off it stopped the engine dead. Walt Fisher said it was the only time he had ever heard the ropes on a steam engine scream! There were problems later with the engine and Newton Pickles said that it was possible that this incident had accelerated their onset.

[Stanley]

The alternator and drive at Bancroft Shed. Installed after WW2 it made us completely independent of the mains. When we had the power cuts Bancroft lights were a puzzle to the locals. They wanted to know how come we had leccy and they didn't!

[Stanley]

I have the quotation for the installation of new electric lights in the weaving shed in 1947 by the Nelson Engineering Company but annoyingly it only covers the shed and not the alternator or general electric wiring throughout the mill. The only allusion is that the 'existing generator' will be under more load and need modification. There is also mention of new distribution boards.... The original lighting was direct current and so at some point the dynamo was replaced by the alternator, the mill rewired for the heavier current and it looks as though all they did in the shed was replace the 110volt bulbs with 240volt. It looks to me as though the alternator was installed just after WW2 and the provision of 432 new lighting points with 200 watt bulbs for £1,984 was the final stage in the modernisation. I doubt if the alternator would have been installed before the war and certainly not during it because of material shortages. Even in 1947 a licence was needed from the Ministry of Works for the materials needed.
In 2013 Allan Smith told me that his father said that Nelson Engineering sub-contracted the actual wiring to another firm and I suspect this was for the first conversion to AC. Charlie Tidsworth was a Barlick engineer who worked on that job. My best guess for the installation of the alternator is 1946.

[PanBiker]

I knew Charlie Tidswell through the TV trade, he always struck me as a nice steady bloke and in my dealings with him always cheery. His business partner Bill Saunders always seemed a bit dour in comparison although I got on with both of them. I used to oyn them for bits for my electronic projects when I was a kid and later the firm on Skipton Road was part of our buying group when I was involved in the trade as a TV Engineer.

[Stanley]

It was a Barlick firm that had the cock up with the Wellhouse alternator when they tested it without noticing that one of the main bus bars had a dead short. See Newton Pickles' evidence in the LTP.....
George Bleasdale, the engineer at Bancroft who preceded me used to have an interesting way of improving the performance of the alternator. He held a wooden stick with emery on the end against the commutator on the exciter. He was trying to address complaints that the voltage was low. I found out later that someone had adjusted the voltmeter on the distribution board so that it reported 440V when it was actually 330V, I bought myself an Avo heavy duty tester (I still have it) and got accurate readings. I got a competent sparks in, I think from Tidswell and Saunders and he found that the problem was that the resistances in the exciter circuit had deteriorated. He replaced them all with new ones and then I had a different problem, I had bulbs blowing all over the weaving shed and complaints from the irascible man on the Barber knotting machine that it was running too fast! Luckily I had just bought a lot of redundant 200watt Edison screw bulbs off the fairground that used to visit Wellhouse once a year so I had plenty of replacements.

[Stanley]

I've just remembered that the anti-vibration light fittings that were installed in the weaving shed in 1947 must have been good quality. When the mill was demolished an electrical firm came in and salvaged all of them for re-use.

[Stanley]

A sad sight, the alternator ended up as scrap in Ouzledale foundry yard.....

[Stanley]

Click to enlarge this pic of the rope race at Ellenroad in 1985. If you look at the bottom you'll see the big 600KVA alternator driven off the flywheel via a large countershaft. I arranged for it to be removed before we demolished the rope race and replaced afterwards. Such a shame that the rope race had to come down but it was dreadfully unstable and rectifying that would have been such a tremendous expense it would have damaged the whole project. Looking back, we should have saved it whatever the expense but there was no money available. If we had saved it I think it would be the only example of a big rope race left.....

[Stanley]

There was one disadvantage to having an alternator driven off the main engine. There was no light source until the engine started. At Bancroft we had a few florescent lights wired directly into the mains supply. At Ellenroad they had a dedicated pilot engine driving a dynamo that could be started independently of the main engine to serve pilot lights all over the mill until the alternator came on stream.

[Stanley]

One day at Ellenroad I turned up with this nameplate and fixed it on the pilot engine. The lads were all puzzled and wanted to know what I was up to. You need money to run projects like Ellenroad and I was expecting a visit from the chairman of Coates Inks, John Youngman and his wife Phyllida who I knew controlled a large charity.... Shortly afterwards we got a donation of £10,000.....

[Stanley]

One of the things that always bugged me at Bancroft was that some previous engineer, I suspect it was George Bleasdale, had painted everything with aluminium paint. Too big a job to start stripping it all off, I had enough to do running and improving the adjustment of the engine without taking that job on. It's a lazy way of caring for an engine.

[Stanley]

My kids pull my leg many a time about the fact that even though I am retired I still run my life to a strict routine and timetable. Old habits die hard and in part this is due to all the time I spent on the road as a wagon driver working against the clock but another factor is my time in the engine house. You can't run a big steam engine without having good routines of regular inspection, and I'm talking about walking round the engine at least once ever 15 minutes, and funnily enough, touching the engine. That's why I always carried a piece of oily waste and wiped the rails over as I walked round, lubricators got a wipe and valve handles as well. I remember reading 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and Mr Pirsig said that the best way to inspect something is to clean it. He was right and after years of this the effects showed. The engine parts developed a shine that could only be got with years of gentle wiping down. This is one of the reasons why I hated that aluminium paint!
Another thing you learned is that some people, and I am one of them, have 'good hands' that don't promote rust. Highly polished steel can rust in twenty minutes of someone with sweaty hands has touched them. My mate Robert Aram remembers well that the first thing I said to him when he made his initial visit to the engine house was me telling him not to touch anything!

[Stanley]

John Burlison has sent me some more pics of Bancroft in 2010.

[Stanley]

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[Stanley]

[Stanley]

Thanks to John for those pics of Bancroft in 2010. The last one of the low pressure crank journal is interesting. You adjust the bearing as it wears by lifting the wedge that is bearing against the bronze shell and it has hardly been moved in the sixty years the engine had run. I never found out why there was a spacer in the top of the joint and didn't bother to investigate it. The bearing was running well, quiet and cool. No point mucking about with it!

[Stanley]

The crossheads were another bearing I never had to alter. The bearing only moved slightly and I think would last forever!

[Stanley]

In general, one of the biggest lessons running big steam engines has taught me is how efficient a good bronze to steel bearing can be. Properly adjusted and lubricated the rate of wear is negligible.....

[Stanley]

A lot of the technology of bronze bearings has been lost these days. It was ignorance about the difference between Aluminium Bronze and heavily leaded bronze that killed my late son in law Big Harry. If the offending bush that failed had been specified by Dick Bonser at Rochdale Harry would still be alive. What has been forgotten is that lead in a bronze alloy acts as a lubricant. Modern fears about the toxicity of lead have made leaded bronzes very hard to source.



Terry Gissing with the replacement bearing shells for the Jubilee engine cast at the Lily Injector works at Rochdale by Dick Bonser.These were exactly the right bronze for the job, the same alloy specified by British Rail for their wheel bearings....

[Stanley]

What is often forgotten these days is that steel working against cast iron, properly lubricated is a very good construction for slow speed bearings or sliding surfaces. These were widely used on steam engines where the conditions were suitable and gave no trouble at all as long as the engineer remembered to give them sufficient oil.