OneGuyFromBarlick

They were very common Wendy. Only the larger farms had the engines, Lurdenlaw is so big it's marked on the map like a village! At Harrod's Farm when I was an apprentice there we had a Lister diesel that drove a generator for power in the house and barn because we had no mains electricity....

We stayed in a holiday cottage on a farm in Devon where the farmer used logs in an old straw burner converted for heat to provide hot water and central heating for his house and the cottage.

Another farm where we've stayed, in Cornwall, has a stone roundhouse cider mill where the horse was used to pulp the apples. (And about 100 yards away there are the remains of an old tidal mill.)

The straw burner would do nicely, 3" tubes and working atmospheric they'll last forever.

Annie, John Ingoe's Paxman engine. This was designed by Paxman for colonial use (Argentina actually) and is a straw burner with 3" tubes. It never left the country because three were ordered and the first one was not paid for so Paxman's left this one unfinished. It was originally just a boiler and engine and was used as a stationary engine. Then wheels were fitted and when John bought it we made the gearing for it so it's a one-off. It steamed well on wood or coal.

All boilers need heavy repair occasionally and that's when you need people like Rochdale Electric Welding who can do any repair including rivets.



A friend of John Ingoe (owner of REW) came to him one day. He had been offered a lovely little traction engine at a very reasonable price because the boiler had been condemned by the insurance surveyor on account of severe grooving (cracking) on the inside of the bend in the plate where the firebox header plate had been formed. The owner of the engine had been told that the only way to cure the fault was to strip the boiler out and fit a new firebox back plate, a very expensive cure. John looked at it and said we could repair it in a much more efficient manner.
The picture shows one side of the back plate (the other side needed the same treatment). The cracking is caused over time by expansion and contraction and the action of the boiler water on plate which has already had its structure deformed by forging to shape. The problem was that the area was completely inaccessible because the horn plates were in the way. The solution was to cut the horn plate away to give access, grind the crack out completely, weld the cut up and then check it with non-destructive testing (NDT). Then the section of horn plate was welded back into place. By the time the welds were ground smooth and repainted you couldn't tell it had been disturbed and the boiler passed a Ten Year survey with flying colours. This involves hydraulicly testing the boiler to 50% above safe working pressure. Result a good engine after an economical repair and a very satisfied customer! Important to realise though that repairs like this involve an incredible amount of skill. Welders of this quality are very thin on the ground!



My part in the repair was to take the back wheels and gearing off the engine so the welders could get at the horn plate and backhead to do their magic.

One regular job I had at REW was doing hydraulic tests of boilers for the Insurance Surveyor. The test was to fill the boiler with water after sealing all the orifices (quite difficult on a traction engine) and then pumping water in until you had a pressure 50% above safe working pressure and holding it there for at least 15 minutes, or until the Surveyor was satisfied. Water was used because, being incompressible, if there was a failure it wasn't an explosion, only a sudden water leak. This made the process safe.
I was always a bit wary of these tests. I did one one day on a large high pressure boiler. The working pressure was 350psi so I had to take it up to over 475psi. I always left the water gauges on and connected as I reckoned they needed testing as well. I got the required pressure and we retired for a cup of tea while we waited for a while. The surveyor noted a slight fall in pressure after about ten minutes but I convinced him that this wasn't a leak but the boiler shell stretching under the enormous pressure. This was doing more harm than good. He agreed with me, let me let the pressure off and passed the boiler.
I did Annie one day for John and as we held it at 50% above red line pressure (Red line because the pressure gauge was marked with a red line at the point where the safety valve should lift) there was a loud crack but no drop in pressure. I told John it was a crown stay breaking under the strain but as it passed the test we left it. Shortly after that I blew the tube plate in the firebox while I was working her heavily driving a big saw at Harewood rally riving green Larch, just about the worst wood to cut. John saw the light and did a complete refurbishment, a new firebox and re-tube.... I was a lot happier with it after that!

Not steam engines but still heavy metal!
`Iron Duke rubber rolling machine installation begins' LINK
"Work has begun on installing a recently restored 19th Century rubber rolling machine at the site where it operated for more than a century. The 16-tonne, 12ft-high (3.5m) device, known as the Iron Duke, was the first of its type in Europe. It enabled rubber to be attached to cloth, meaning waterproof garments like capes could be made. Work to install it at Kingston Mills in Bradford-on-Avon, where it spent its working life, will take three days. Built in 1848, the Iron Duke, named after the Duke of Wellington, was central to the start of the rubber industry in the town, and it stayed in service until the 1960s. Bradford-on-Avon's Museum Society and Preservation Trust restored the machine, which had been stored in the Industrial Museum in Bristol since 1973 in pieces."

Interesting machine Tiz and from the weight of the gearing and size of the bearing journals a lot of pressure is applied to the rollers. I don't know whether the same applies to this machine but in similar calendar rollers used in the steel industry the rolls were turned slightly barrel shaped to allow for deflection under pressure.

I've mentioned it before but one of the design elements in a large engine is to take measures to allow for deflection in long shafts. A steel shaft, no matter how heavy, bends downwards if only supported at each end. A good example of this is the piston rod which in the case of engines like Bancroft is 4" thick and can be 15ft long. The LP rod is the worst as it has the weight of the large CI piston in the middle. Newton told me that the makers compensated for this by putting a set or bend in the shaft on the top side so that theoretically when the weight came on it was straight. In the Bancroft case the rod was fitted upside down and Roberts had to come back and reverse it as the piston was bearing on the bottom of the bore.
If you look at a tandem engine like Ellenroad the rod is even longer and there is no support at the tail end. However, you'll see that there is a support bearing in between the HP and LP cylinders and as the weight of the HP piston is on the back end of the rod this tends to counteract any tendency to bend downwards. In practice this works well.

In the case of the calendar rollers one solution apart from barreling was to have the rollers offset a fraction to produce a bending moment, ie if one longtitudinal roller axis was north south, the next roller would be offset a degree or two (don't know how much). Very clever fellows these engineers.

This reminds me of the roller mills used for grinding wheat. The smooth reduction rolls were provided with a camber for two reason:
1. To allow for roll expansion due to heating - the greatest heat is generated adjacent to the bearings.
2. To counteract the slight deflection of the rolls under load. The amount of deflection is likely to vary with the roll length, the pressure exerted and the feed rate.
The camber could be machined as an arc or a taper. LINK

You are all correct....
There is another place where deflection in a long shaft can cause problems. Some flywheel shafts can be up to 30ft between bearings and no matter how thick they bend as they are mounted horizontally. The lower the speed the worse the deflection and this has the effect of continually flexing the shaft which can lead to cracking. The old designers countered this by running the shafts as fast as they dared considering the propensity of cast iron flywheels to fail under centrifugal force if run to fast. The effect on the shaft was to reduce the flexing. That's why all the engines I have put back in steam run at their design speed. I had long arguments with the H&S people and English Heritage about this and in the end they agreed I was right.

In general, when fitting large flywheels that were made so that two were mounted side by side with half the ropes on each, the wheels were mounted so that they touched and acted as a stiffening agent on the shaft which worked as long as the engine was run at a speed designed to limit flexing of the shaft due to the influence of centrifugal force and the speed of rotation not allowing the shaft time enough to flex. Occasionally even this failed and the flexing meant that the flywheels touched at the top but had a gap at the bottom and over time this loosened the stakes fastening the flywheels to the shaft. If you look in the LTP at Newton Pickles evidence he details a case of this. The cure was to move the wheels 1" apart so they didn't touch.
Where this becomes even more important is when an engine is run at half speed or slower on the grounds that it is safer. It is actually more dangerous! See my report of the time I found the flywheel of the Trencherfield Engine at Wigan Pier was rolling off its stakes. That didn't half put the cat amongst the pigeons and in the end the Metropitan Council got me in to advise them but they didn't like my solution, to re-stake the offending wheel and run the engine at design speed. You can't win them all! They got another 'expert' in to give them different advice and when I saw what he proposed I asked them to note my objections and tell me in writing that they had listened to me and that I had discharged my Duty of Care. That letter is on file....... If anything happens they can't blame me!

It would seem that good advice on steam engines is getting thin on the ground. I say this because in the last few weeks I have been contacted a couple of times for an opinion. We are dying off and shortly there will be nobody left who ran these machines commercially!

You might wonder why a pic of a handsome woman appears in this topic. This is the late Phyllis Watson, one of the weavers at Bancroft in the engine house at going home time. I was reminded of Phyllis by her daughter thanking me yesterday for the obituary I wrote in 2008. This reminded me of another facet of my job at Bancroft running the engine and driving the looms that gave the weaver's their wage. They were canny workers and soon realised that because of the effort I was putting in to give them constant speeds at just the right level for the atmospheric conditions their wages were higher. That's why I look back at those days and relationships with such affection. I wonder how many jobs today are as rewarding? It's a forgotten part of the job.

Many of you may have heard the expression 'Mee Mawing'. This was the exaggerated lip movement used by the weavers to communicate with each other against the sound of the looms. I soon found that if I wanted to give a message to them, say if I was going to stop the engine for a few minutes due to an emergency like a drive rope breaking in the warehouse all I had to do was pop my head through the door and mee maw to the nearest weaver. In under five minutes the message had gone right round the shed.

When you saw weavers with their heads together like budgies in a cage, they were hiding their lip movements for privacy.....

Ellenroad engine in 1991, getting close to the end of a long hard road!
[And yes, I should have moved the tripod!]

Six years earlier it looked like this. It took a lot of time and elbow grease to get it cleaned up......

The transformation of the engine was down to my lovely Manpower Services workers. This scheme was a godsend for the project and they were good workers. I had three men working on cleaning the engine for over four years and they did a good job. The scheme was much criticised but given proper supervision good work could be done and Ellenroad would never have been completed without them. Visitors were amazed by the amount and quality of the work they did.

Two of the lads hard at work. They got a bit too enthusiastic at times. If you have a look at the back end of the cylinder on the left they have spent so much time on the target end (the bluing was in bad condition) that they have polished it bright! I had been away for a week on holiday and had to forgive them.....

I am reminded that nobody will ever know the amount of work we put in on that engine.

This man was a visitor in 1977 and filmed the engine. (He reminded me of Christie the murderer!) However, the pic is here because it shows the only bit of painting I did on the engine. I had some light green gloss paint left over from a job at home and decided it would look well on the pillars that supported the rails.

Some engineer before me painted the polished parts of the cylinder lids and other parts with aluminium paint and I always had a hankering to take it off but it would have been such a big job.....

I was engine testing in the shed yesterday and remembered what Newton once told me about engine tenters. Some of them were frightened of their engines. Newton said it was usually the ones who didn't know much about how they worked. One however had good reason to be nervous, this was at Crow Nest after the LP piston split and destroyed the cylinder.



Brown and Pickles got it going again eventually but for over six months Newton used to go down and start the engine in the morning for him. Understandable, it must have been a very frightening thing.