STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

Bullard vertical borer leaving the Wellhouse shop en route for Gissing and Lonsdale's February 1981. This is the same borer that was used for the Jubilee bearing shells in 2004.

[Stanley]

What happens if you don't look after a big journal and bearing. The badly roped (grooved) journal on the broken Glasshouses waterwheel shaft.

[Stanley]

The Glasshouses shaft in the car park at Quarry Bank Mill Styal. All was not as good as it looks, the shaft was broken inside the spoke housing and a new one had to be cast. It was the breakage of the shaft in a hard frost that stopped the wheel when it drove the mill at Pately Bridge.

[Stanley]

Water power is often assumed to be a cheap source of power. Not always the case. This is the underground head race just before the wheel at Quarry Bank at Styal. Expensive work and it all had to be kept clean and maintained.

[Stanley]

This is what happens if a water resource isn't maintained. Clough mill dam, Barlick, completely silted up.

[Stanley]

The watercourses and dams for Ouzledale and Clough in about 1880·

[Stanley]

Ouzledale dam as it is today, totally silted up.

[Bodger]

Is that where they based the desigin of the Hoover dam ?

[Stanley]

A good point Bodge. It would be built sometime in the 18th century and the masons certainly understood the principle of the arch laid on its side!



All the other dams in Barlick were built straight like the Corn Mill Dam on Butts Beck. This has a central sluice gate, now disused and is silted up. If you look carefully at the pic of the Ouzledale dam you can see the original sluice at the bottom on the left hand side. The gear for the gate has long since gone.

[Stanley]

Some weirs were better than others! This is the weir on the River Beal at Newhey that served Ellenroad engine. The condenser pumps drew about 4,000 gallons of water a minute at full power and there is no record of the weir ever failing to supply that amount. Interesting to note that as Newton Pickles once said, "We were only borrowing the water!". All the water diverted to the engines was returned as slightly warmer water below the weir.

[Stanley]

The condenser water at Ellenroad returning to the River Beal. (We only borrowed it!) This is a moderate flow as the engines run light now, on full power it would be a lot more. The other pipe further down the wall is a large land drain.

[Stanley]

As Walt Fisher once said, "When they did away with engines they got rid of a lot of hard work!". Caulking a leaky rivet on the angle ring at the front of the Bancroft boiler during summer maintenance in 1977. The contractors were Rochdale Electric Welding. Being outside the area they didn't charge holiday rates and this was a big consideration as the work was always done during the Wakes fortnight when the mill was stopped. Note the new brickwork in the pit, this was done by a firm based on a farm at Gisburn for the same reason.

[Stanley]

The clever mechanism on a Green's economiser which reverses the drive to the tube scrapers automatically.

[Stanley]

Big job! Low pressure cylinder for Plumb Street Mill engine being bored at Wellhouse Shop. 1958. The interesting thing about this is that the cylinder was too big to get on either the horizontal borer or any of the big lathes so they set it up in the shop and used the portable boring set they used for boring cylinders in situ.

[Stanley]

The gearing on the 700hp Yates engine at Long Ing Shed in 1890. The gears were badly cast and it took years of repeated chipping to get them anywhere near a good drive. However, though always noisy it never failed the mill. The biggest consequence was, as is usual with bad gearing, the vibration led to trouble with the flywheel coming loose on its stakes. See Newton Pickles in the LTP.

[Stanley]

Another engine that was plagued by gear problems was the big, slow-running Musgrave at Butts Mill. The gear was very rough and the vibration caused problems for almost its whole life, loose gear segments, fractured bolts in the flywheel and endless problems tin the shafting as the vibration travelled through the mill. Search the Calf Hall Shed Company minute books on the site for a catalogue of problems. Eventually Brown and Pickles took the engine over and seemed to have alleviated most of the problems before it closed down in 1932. Contrast this with engines like the one at Pendle Street in Nelson that had machine cut herringbone gears and ran like silk with no problems.

[Bodger]

Re cast gears, where i served my time, the early machines used cast gears, if they were deemed "noisy" a mix of oil & grinding dust was poured on the offending geas and run untill the noise dropped, they were then washed with kerosene, andfully greased

[Stanley]

One way of quietening them Bodge but it wore them out quicker. The main cause of problems with big gearing was not making the proper allowances for shrinkage during casting which not only affected the length but in big gears cast in segments, affected the radius of the curve. This meant that the height of the gears differed and the only remedy was to try to chip the gears to somewhere near the correct shape. But as Newton said to me once, "You can't chip to pitch", you can never get back to the correct shape, only 'improve' them. This was why Newton always favoured machine cut gears in steel. Funnily enough, when Quarry Bank made the gear segments for the water wheel from Glasshouses they hit the same problem, the modern foundries had forgotten the skills needed in casting gears. I warned them before they had the castings done and advised them to have the segments cut out of thick plate but they ignored me, English Heritage wanted cast iron gears as this was the original design. When John Ingoe refurbished Annie he had the gears flame cut at Bolton Profiles and they were successful.

[Stanley]

This replacement flywheel by Roberts at Nelson was a case in point. It was made for the Bishop House engine in Burnley after they had a smash due to overspeed. Newton was on the job and when they got it installed they found that the jack wheel was not true, it had to be chipped back to pitch circle diameter and it took weeks. At first Newton rejected it but Roberts said that if they had to remake it they would be bankrupt.

[Stanley]

The jack wheel on the left of the Pendle Street Mill engine flywheel in Nelson is covered by a sheet metal guard but it was steel gears, machine cut, double helical and ran perfectly all its life. The gearing you can see on the flywheel itself is for the barring engine.

[Stanley]

The gearing alley at Crow Nest Shed. Most lineshafts were in the open on wall brackets but some mills had a better arrangement. The main lineshaft was in an enclosed alley with a permanent walkway at shaft level, much quieter and easier to maintain.

[Bodger]

Stanley, Gearing Alley, is the lineshaft above in the center with drop feeds down the wall into the boxes, or am i reading the pic. wrong ?

[Stanley]

Main shaft has large bevels meshing with two bevels either side and the cross shafts go out from these to each side into weaving sheds on both sides of the alley. The heavy rods on the wall are the holding down bolts for the assembly of girders that supports each gear.



Most lineshafts were mounted on wall brackets inside the shed like this one at Bancroft. The wall was built about 3ft thick to support the load.

[Stanley]

The gearing alley at Fernbank Mill in Barlick.

[Stanley]

Came across this pic yesterday when I was doing Newton's tapes for the LTP. The man is Harry Crabtree and he's poking his two foot rule through the broken flyshaft at Victoria Mill in Earby in 1954. Newton is stood behind the pedestal. This was a great relief for Newton because against all opinion he had been convinced that the shaft was broken but it took them two days to find the crack buried under the large eccentrics which were the only things stopping the shaft from parting completely.