STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

A friend of mine had a Fowler Ploughing engine.



One weekend he invited me to go down to Upton near Altrincham where he was going to plough with the man who had the matching engine to his, they worked in pairs. I was so impressed with the way they handled the load, a six furrow plough and a big cultivator. There was no fuss, they just pulled immediately the throttle was opened. Even when the cultivator was stopped in mid travel and had to be started again against the dead load of all those big tines buried in the ground it just started as though there was nothing to pull. The man who owned the farm had just spent an enormous amount on a big new tractor. He admitted that when the lads had approached him to ask if they could plough his stubble he thought they would just be playing out but when he saw the Fowlers at work he was amazed how fast and efficient they were. He said that there was no way his tractor could restart with the cultivator bedded into the ground.
I only saw a pair of engines at work in the flesh once before in the 1950s when I was farming in Warwickshire. They were dredging the lake at Compton Wynyates, a big country house. They dragged an enormous bucket through the lake with no fuss at all. If you ever get the chance to see them at work, go for it!

[Stanley]

Here's my mate's Fowler at Utrecht in 1997.......

[Stanley]

The Mammoth floating crane at Liverpool in the 1970s. I once saw it making a heavy lift as I waited to unload on the dock. We spent a lot of time doing that in the 60s! It was driven by an incredibly small horizontal steam engine but geared right down of course. Nevertheless it was amazing to watch it stop and start in the middle of a heavy lift with no fuss at all. No clutch, it just started at full torque. This was one of the best examples of this characteristic of steam engines.

[Stanley]

In the early engines gear drive was universal for big engines but cotton rope driving became popular around 1900. Tenants in the sheds were a bit suspicious of rope drives because they feared slippage in the drive. In fact rope driving was quieter and easier on the shafting and gearing in the shed as it was a 'softer' drive. One thing that's often forgotten is that in some cases leather or steel belts were preferred. I've never seen a steel belt and know nothing about them but I think they were quite successful. Newton told a good story about fitting a new, very big, leather belt on an engine. The owner watched them and complained because he hadn't realised that it was made of multiple skins held together with copper rivets. The fitter asked him if he had ever seen a cow 40 feet long!
One thing that puzzled me for a long time was the fact that you could buy round leather belting in lengths up to 100ft. I found that the way they did it was to cut the leather in a spiral, the special cutter shaved the square section into a round belt.....

[Bodger]

Where i started my apprenticeship it was a steam powered line shaft arrangement, the first belt from the engine passed above the exit to the toilets, it was known for some of the machine operators especially on Mon. mornings to toss the dregs of their bill can on to the belt this invariably led to the belt coming off leading to a good break whilst the belt was reconnected

[Stanley]

Nice one Bodge! There was an opposite scenario in the shed. Different sorts of cloth and weft would stand different speeds. If a weaver was chasing picks and wanted to improve her wage she would dribble a drop of black treacle on the leather driving belt, some of them even used 'Grippo', a proprietary belt dressing that did the same thing. If a tackler got wind of this he dosed the belt with talcum powder to cancel the Grippo out. It meant that there was more chance of that loom giving him extra work if it was speeded up. It was a constant battle with some weavers!

[Stanley]

Gwen, a good weaver, in the shed in 1977. The forest of leather belts amazed modern visitors who recognised how dangerous they could be. In about 1975 we were moved out of the jurisdiction of the Yorkshire Factory Inspectorate and became the responsibility of the men at Quay Street in Manchester. We got an unexpected visit one day from a young inspector and when he saw the weaving shed he was visibly shocked, he had never seen a belt driven factory before or a steam engine. He told me he was not happy and would have to consult with his superiors. A few days later the Chief Inspector turned up and was enthralled, he hadn't got an old fashioned weaving shed in his area. He asked me how long we expected to survive and I told him not long. Then he asked me a lot of questions and said he was going to come back and bring his young staff members with him.
A few days later we got a convoy of cars and about 15 earnest looking young men. The Chief took them on a tour of the mill and then gave them a lecture in the engine house on steam power and lineshaft driving. He pointed out that though it was all new to them, this was how factories used to run and he drew their attention to the Accident Book which was clean, nothing beyond the usual cut fingers and minor falls. He pointed out also that the workers were used to it and very skilled and that Bancroft was inherently no more dangerous than any other mill. He said that under modern regulations they could insist on every belt being guarded and stop me going near the engine when it was running but that would close the mill and put everyone out of work. The upshot was that we were left alone apart from him bringing visitors to see how industry used to be run!

[Stanley]

My old friend Fred Inman, tackler and gent, putting a belt on to the driving pulley by flicking it on and then installing the other end on the driving pulley on the loom. He's doing it at dinnertime while the engine is stopped but he told me that some tacklers would quite happily do it while the shafting was running but he thought it was too dangerous. I have to say I can see his point!

[Stanley]

One thing I remember clearly from the young inspoector's visit was his horror when he saw me feeling the crosshead by leaning over the engine and putting my hand on the end of the con rod while the engine was doing 78rpm. I also let the crank end of the rod graze my hand as it turned, to feel the temperature. He said it was dangerous and I agreed with him but pointed out that I was used to it and always had a firm grip of the rail and a good foothold on the carpet. He shook his head and I could see he didn't like it. he must have reported back because when the Chief came he asked me about it. He saw the point and didn't give me any grief.



The carpets down the side of the engine weren't just for comfort. They gave a sure footing when you were oiling or attending to the engine and also attracted dust and grit. This meant that there was less muck settling on the engine as it ran or floating about in the air.

[Stanley]

The roof of the engine house at Bancroft Shed was supported by heavy angle iron trusses and lined with varnished boards. It looks fine but had not been cleaned since 1920 and an occasional minor disaster was when a bird got in the house and fluttered about in the roof. It dislodged muck and grit and it showered down on the engine, the last thing you want and it immediately triggered a big cleaning job, particularly in the exposed slides for the cross heads and tail rods. The cure was to open all the doors and hope that it found it's way out.
At Ellenroad we had trouble with pigeons and my cure there was a powerful .22 BSA air rifle and a bit of target practice. I didn't like doing it but you would be amazed at the muck even a sparrow brought down!

[Stanley]

That's why I used to sheet the engine up at holiday time. It saved a lot of work if a bird got in!
One thing you may have noticed about Bancroft engine is the cast in gutter at the base of the engine beds which I lined with ropes of soft waste from the taping machines. It absorbed any oil and when it was soaked I got clean waste and replaced it. The old was stored in old 40 gallon oil drums and used for fire-lighting in the boiler house. Any excess was burned and we got the benefit of the calorific value!

[Stanley]

Talking about oil on the beds reminds me that on the whole, engineers tend to use too much oil!
If you look carefully at this pic of the LP tail-slide and bell crank you'll see that there is a small lubricator on each of the ends of the small connecting rods that lie between the end of the tail rod and the top bearing of the bell crank which is driving the air pump in the cellar. This pic was in 1976 when I was just getting to know the engine. The routine was to top up these lubricators with bearing oil at starting time and dinner and during the day the relatively thin oil did its job in the bearings but then flew off to the front and the back. It even got onto the engine house window! After a while I gained enough confidence to take these oilers off and instead of using bearing oil I put a drop of cylinder oil in the holes. The rods are only oscillating and as it transpired, this was all that was needed. Less oil used, less mess and the engine didn't suffer.



This is the low pressure crank and the banjo oiler, a lovely solution to the problem of getting oil into the crank pin at 78rpm. George was frightened of the crank pins getting hot and used to have a drop falling every revolution. As I gained confidence I cut this back until I was on a drop every five revolutions. The crank was still cool and I have no doubt I could have gone further but I didn't push my luck. If you multiply this approach for all the bearings on the engine it soon mounts up to a saving on oil and mess. However, even I had my limits and I have little doubt I was still using more oil than was strictly necessary. Better than a hot neck! As Newton used to say, hearing a bearing clicking was no problem but as soon as you could smell it you were in trouble!

[Stanley]

Bearings clicking...... Almost certainly a sign that they were a bit slack. The trick was to make the right decision about whether it mattered! I never worried about it and indeed when Newton and I accidentally over-speeded the Ellenroad engine and got it up to about 100rpm one thing we noted was that as it speeded up the play in the bearings vanished, it was going too fast to knock!
My dad told me a story about this..... In his younger days he worked at a large Manchester firm that generated its own leccy with a bank of Willans high speed engines. One of them developed a bad knock in a flyshaft bearing so they stripped it down, ground the journals, made new brasses for it and reassembled it. The bearing ran hot as soon as they started it and in the end it was an old fitter who cured it for them. He scarred the ground journal with a big blacksmith's rasp! They roughly filed the journal and reassembled it. It ran perfectly. What the old fitter had demonstrated was that in the flooded lubrication they were using there had to be enough room in the interface between the shaft and the bearing metal to allow a wedge of oil to build up and it helped if the journal had 'oil pockets' in it. I did a lot of reading about this and eventually got quite a firm grasp of lubrication! A lot of this knowledge has been lost today and the bottom line is that a bit of play in a big bronze bearing is a good thing!

[Stanley]

My investigations into lubrication led me into some quite esoteric fields, I learned about electrolytic corrosion and the corrosion cell being at the root of almost all corrosion events. I learned that all sorts of things could trigger the cells, pressure and temperature difference, vibration and friction.
The latter is particularly common in steam engines. If two metal surfaces, even if flooded with oil, under pressure rub against each other corrosion follows. You can always identify it because the oxide produced is bright red and was always described as 'bleeding'.



Here's the crosshead cotter in the LP side at Bancroft. The Bancroft engine had always been troubled by a thump in the LP side that was always put down to the Roberts air pump which was badly designed. One day I was walking down the side of the engine while it was stopped and noticed that the cotter was bleeding more than usual. I clouted it with the lump hammer and it went in 1/8" so I hit it again and it moved even more. At closing time I got Newton in and we knocked the cotter out. It was badly worn and we had found the thump. He made two new cotters and we replaced them on both sides. The LP side was badly fitted and we had to put a spacer washer inside the crosshead so the cotter could bite. We ran it in the evening on Xmas Eve to make sure we hadn't moved the LP piston back too far and the thump had vanished, never to appear again!



I still have the cotters. The HP one (smaller) was OK but the near one, the LP cotter, was badly worn, if you look carefully you can see the depression on the near side to the camera.

[chinatyke]

Are cotters tapered?

[Stanley]

Yes China, on both faces. They used to be forged out of the best faggoted steel repeatedly folded to give more strength. Today they are made out of the best quality steel. The way to make them used to be to forge the taper in on the anvil but now it is best done on a shaper.



Bob Fort making taper keys on the shaper in 1979.

[Stanley]

The Lumb governor and Wilby speed regulator on the Bancroft engine in 1977. Originally the engine had a Whitehead governor but following complaints about uneven speed affecting weaving it was replaced on the advice of Johnny Pickles.



George Hoggarth with his weavers and the Whitehead governor in early years.

The Lumb governor was a complete cure. If everything was properly adjusted, valves, rope lubrication and constant steam pressure, it held the speed beautifully and in the latter days governed perfectly on hardly any load with full steam pressure. Newton told me one day that he had never seen and engine with single port valves run as steadily as that on low load. He reckoned that if I kept at it I might become a half decent engine tenter!

[Stanley]

The Wilby speed regulator on the Lumb governor. A fascinating design that constantly monitored the speed and made minute adjustments to the steam valves. Too complicated for a short explanation, I watched it for weeks before I understood it. Using the wing nut to alter the pear shaped weight you could make tiny adjustments to the speed of the engine. Useful as the humidity changed and affected the leather belt drives in the shed.



Billy Lambert, an old tackler who was a weaver. I used to take his advice every morning on the speed and make the necessary adjustment. Only a small thing but attention to details like this put the wages up in the shed and I was a very popular bloke!

[Stanley]

From time to time comments were made about me and John Plummer, my firebeater, because we were often seen during the day 'wandering' about the mill. Some drew the conclusion that we were under-employed. They were wrong. In order to do our jobs efficiently we had to know what was going on in the shed. In John's case he was running a large Lancashire boiler that took 20 minutes to respond to a change in demand. I encouraged John to have a wander so that he got wind of any changes in demand like the tapers starting a boil on one of their size becks. This used a lot of steam and if John had forewarning he could increase the rate of firing well before they started, it was quite amazing how much steam this used.
I could see the transmission system running, take notice of any bearings that looked warm, you could see the cotton fly on the outside of the bearing turning brown if one was in trouble. Feedback from the weavers gave me clues about the optimum speed and a close eye on the weather gave me a clue about whether I needed to put the shed lights in. This was done from the engine house distribution board and put a significant load on the engine using more steam and I used to warn John well before I did it. They always said that the best manure was the farmer's foot, management by walking about is recommended to business executives, exactly the same thing applied to us.

[Stanley]

The distribution board serving the alternator and mains at Bancroft shed. The mains only served the engine and boiler houses and office. Switching over to the alternator once I had speed up at starting time was always the first job. All the lights in the body of the mill were controlled by one large breaker and they were only put on if it was gloomy or dark. This put about 100hp extra on the engine and the speed regulator took a while to compensate so I developed a ploy that meant I could switch them in with very little speed variation. I used to warn John that I was going to do it twenty minutes before if I could so he could adjust his coal feed. I went to the governor and manually wound the Wilby regulator about two and a half turns open which caused the speed to slowly start increasing, as soon as I did this I ran round the HP side to the board and threw the breaker in which instantly caught the overspeed and the net result was that the weavers hardly noticed the change.

[Stanley]

If you look at the distributor board you'll see three meters, They gave the alternator cycles, volts and amps. I have a story about the Barber Knotting machine. I have to report that the man who ran the machine didn’t like me. I could never understand why but in later years it was suggested to me that when George Bleasdale, the old engine tenter finished, there was some hope that a relation of the man on the knotter would get the engineer’s job. I don’t know what truth there is in this but it would explain a lot of things. We have to pop back into the office for a moment to explain how this story came about. Can you remember me mentioning that the two most important parts of the office equipment were the old Imperial typewriter and an electric adding machine that must have been one of the first ever made? The quality of the electricity I was making didn’t suit the adding machine. It was only used on Thursday to calculate the wages and if I didn’t switch the office circuit onto the mains the decimal point on the calculator used to go berserk and jump about all over the place. No problem there but I was always getting digs from the man on the knotter about the fact that his machine ran too slow because I wasn’t running the engine fast enough. More about engine speed later but this wasn’t the problem. His troubles stemmed from the fact that being an American machine it ran on 110v DC which was fine in the early days when this was the voltage used in the mill but became a problem when we went over to 250v single phase for the mill circuits in 1948. The solution was to fit a transformer and inverter which converted the standard UK voltage to one which suited the knotter. The complaints escalated until the man really upset me one day by accusing me of being frightened of the engine. I told him that speed wasn’t the problem and that they had suffered from this ever since the mill was converted to 250v in 1948 and nobody had ever found the cause. I said I’d find it and satisfy him.

You’re right, I was angry! I went out and spent two week’s wage on a heavy duty Avo multi-meter, a specialised piece of measuring equipment which I still have. On the Monday morning I took some readings in the engine house. The meters on the distribution board told me that I was making AC current at 440v three phase which was correct. However, when I took the same reading with the very accurate Avo meter it told me that the voltage was actually a fraction below 400v. An alternator’s voltage level is governed by the voltage of electricity you inject into the main exciter coils. This initial current is made by a small dynamo mounted on the end of the alternator and you can control the level of this and hence the output from the alternator by adjusting the resistance in the circuit between the exciter dynamo and the main coils. My problem was that even when set to maximum the exciter wasn’t delivering the requisite current to the main coils, the fixed resistances in the circuit had degraded and were impeding the flow too much. The reason why the voltmeter on the switchboard was reading the correct voltage was that someone had adjusted it to read 440 when it should have been saying 400!

This was a job for the sparks. I got a professional electrician in and he fitted new fixed resistances. We re-calibrated the voltmeter on the panel using my Avo because being brand new we knew it was accurate. I switched the alternator back on line and went up to the office to see if Sidney’s calculator was behaving itself. He tried it and was delighted, the numbers on the display were brighter, had stopped flickering and the decimal point as steady as a rock. I had earned a cup of tea.

Later in the day I was taking my ease in the engine house with a cup of tea and Jim came down to ask me what I had done to the alternator. Frank Bleasdale, the Winding master had told Jim that his winders were working better than they had ever done and production had risen by about 20%. (They ran off 440v AC) Jim also reported that the man on the knotter wasn’t happy. His machine had doubled its speed and because he hadn’t maintained it properly over the years he was having to overhaul it. On the quiet I think Jim was really pleased but ever the diplomat he didn’t say so. The reason I think this is that anything that pushed production up made his life easier. Later that day I went up into the preparation department and was treated to a torrent of verbal abuse from the vicinity of the Barber Knotter. I simply told the bloke he had asked for better power and now he’d got it he’d have to live with it. Oh, and by the way, the engine is running at exactly the same speed. Game set and match to Stanley, always a nice feeling…

There was a sequel. About two months earlier a man who ran a travelling fair had come to see me and asked if I wanted to buy a lot of 150 watt Edison screw bulbs that he had which were redundant because they had altered their lighting systems. They were very cheap so after having a word with Sidney the mill bought them. All this happened in summer when there was very little demand for shed lighting but then we got a thundery day with low cloud and in the afternoon I decided we’d better have the shed lights on. These were all controlled from a big breaker box on the switchboard. I put the lights on and immediately got reports from the shed that a lot of bulbs had blown. This was of course because it was the first time for almost thirty years that they had received a full 250v. Jim and I went in the shed with a case full of the bulbs I had bought off the fairground people and inside an hour we had every lamp up and running again. The level of light in the shed had gone up tremendously and Jim said that the extra production due to this would more than make up for the extra coal I was burning driving the rejuvenated alternator. Doubles all round! By doing a simple bit of checking and maintenance we had increased the efficiency of the mill and raised profits. I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere…

[Stanley]

The alternator, a valuable member of the team! After my improvements I had to tighten the Speedona belt counter-drive. First time it had been touched since it was installed in the 1940s. Very satisfying......

[Stanley]

N&R men scrapping the alternator and distribution board in 1979. A big mistake as it could have been a significant asset for the Bancroft Trust but demolition was in the air and at this point it wasn't clear what the future of the engine was. It was depressing to see useful machinery being scrapped....

[Stanley]

The Speedona counter drive for the alternator. Ring oilers on all the bearings, a lovely job and never gave a minute's trouble. All you had to do was pop an occasional drop of oil in the bearings.



All the scrap from the demolition went to Ouzledale Foundry (Firemaster) and I followed it's progress as it was broken down melted and recycled to make fire-grates.



Note the 1979 standards of protective clothing......

[Stanley]

It was a sad experience looking at things like these cast iron bevel wheels. I had spent years caring for them....
There were however some lessons to be learnt. Look at the split shaft with one CI end and journal left on it.



This is the sow box on the taping machine at Bancroft. The large copper immersion roller that is just being lowered to force the web into the boiling size is what the shaft came out of. It's forged out of wrought iron and split in the middle to that it can 'give' under the strain of the differential expansion between the copper cylinder and the iron shaft when it is in the boiling size. I knew about this because Newton had told me how it was done but this was confirmation of what I was told that I wouldn't have gained without seeing it opened up. Clouds can have silver linings!