1870 Stationary Steam Engine

[DavidL]

I found this photo of a Riches & Watts industrial steam engine built circa 1870.  It appealed so much that I decided to attempt a model based on that picture.  I'm not into casting, so all the component parts are being machined from stock. (At my age and being a real novice, I reckon on steering clear of molten metal!)

Firstly I drew up a set of working drawings and constructed a 3D CAD model of the engine.  If anyone is interested, I'm happy to share the drawings, but be aware that the engine is under construction and the drawings will surely have errors to be corrected as the build progresses.  I'm attaching some photographs of the build progress to date together with a 3D view of how I envisiage the completed engine will look like.

[b.lindsey]

Nice David, I'd say you are off to a great start!! Will the governor be functional or just decorative?

Bill

[Jasonb]

Hi David its interesting that you say its a Riches & Watts as it looks to be a Tidman organ engine which I have just started to scratch build myself. There is also a sull size Tidman being built in Model Engineeer mag at the moment. I think the one on the etching in the background is a Richie & Watts but the engine in the foreground is a Tidman





What scale are you building it to? mine is 2/3rds full size.



J

[DavidL]

Hi Bill,
The govenor will work in the sense that it rotates and the vertical movement mechanism functions.  However, I've not yet developed the design of linkages and control valve to throttle the input steam/compressed air.

[DavidL]

Hi Jason,
Fascinating about an organ engine.  I attach a 19th C poster of the Oxford show illustrating a Riches and Watts engine.  Note that the govenor is mounted on the boiler.
Mine is not to any particular scale.  I based the proportions on the photograph and the absolute size on the capcity of my little Seig lathe to turn up a 100mm dia flywheel.
cheers
David

[oehrick]

Hi

I can confirm that you are building a model of one of Tidmans organ engines Jason and your drawing looks good but there appears to be one very interesting feature of this engine that you & David may not have been able to deduce from the pictures, the engine has an internal port in the cyclinder and exhausts down one of the hollow A frame legs, through a passage in the base plate and thence piped into the centre engine smokebox (above which they stood) and into the exhaust pipe.

I only twigged this as a few years back I bought a couple of full size sets of castings for a similar model, these had been cast by GME (Gratten Model Engineers) and were a mixture of plated / rattled in the sand original engine parts - so full size less some machined dimensions and contraction loss.

I'm gradually working on drawings (very fortunate in having a couple of prints of drawings made by my much missed friend Ronald H Clark from Tidmans original sketches). These will be built using my ex REME 1918 Drummond 5" lathe which has only just been fitted with a motor (hence its known as my 1 legged jogging machine) and a Drummond hand shaper of similar vintage.

Jason, you may be interested to know that I have a 2 NHP Riches and Watts of the 'Oxford Medal' type you picture, got to it the day after the scrapmen unfortunately so it is minus boiler and bedplate and the gas axed crankshaft is now a little shorter as it was re-united with male and female taper. It has a double web crank, no expansion valve and until I saw the first illustration in a R&W catalogue (thanks to RHC again) I just couldn't figure out where the governor fitted - everything else was rebuilt on an RSJ and plate bed from basic principles and runs very nicely.

Finding this led me to another survivor locally, a 1nhp built as a stand alone which subsequently came to live here after a post mortem sale, it needed a fair bit of work such as metal spraying the mains bearings as they were so badly corroded, bored out and replaced the (single web) crankpin as I could not see a viable way of recovering the original. Much work to get the slide valve fit to use, amazingly the valve face and bore were not too bad but the rings dropped through barely touching the sides so new ones were made (never NEVER pass up an old 4lb scale weight) and like the 2nhp piston and valve rods were shot so replaced in 316 stainless as they will spend more time stood in the glands than wearing. I had this running before restoration but the main boiler has been out of action for a while so not tried out since TLC administered.

It is possible that the 2nhp is the oldest surviving and the 1nhp the youngest surviving R&W engine however there are other survivors, a large horizontal in the Gressenhall RL museum here in Norfolk, a simplex pump near the Tidman pictured above are those known in the UK, a tandem compound vertical a few engine no's older than the 1nhp is being rebuilt in Canterbury NZ (I cast a name plate for them using metal from a boiler fitting last runny at R&W's foundry as the nearest to their lost original as could be ) a tandem compound portable is preserved at the Pigeon Valley museum again NZ and another inverted vertical with boiler is being restored in the Puffing Billy railway workshops in Australia.

Unfortunately my laptop has died so I'm using the heap which normally drives the engraver in the workshop so am unable to access more details or pics at present but should be able to post a few Tidman pics in due course which may help the build.

Cheers & beers

Rick

PS managed to save enough of the 3 throw horizontal water pump the 2 nhp originally drove to rebuild and found a R&W oilcake breaker so both engines will have something authentic to play with, the cake breaker and a locally made root shredder by Randells of Nth Walsham are used to prepare apples for pressing, the aim is this activity will someday become steam powered when I get too old to crank the 'andles !

[Jasonb]

Welcome to the Forum Rick, maybe you could start a new thread to show some pictures of your engine collection, I'm sure all here would be interested.

The one being built in Model Engineer mag at the moment is also from a set of GME castings I think, (the patterns are now with Engineers Emporium) and has been based on photos of one in a museum which is what I have also scaled mine from.

I would also be interested in the drawings that you hace by R H Clark as the museum one is missing most of the governor and it would also be nice to confirm a few more of my scaled dimensions.

Fear not the steam passage down the leg has been included in mine. The legs are welded up from 3mm laser cut plates and I will run a pipe down through the leg from the cylinder mounting flange and through the base.

You can see the hole in the leg mounting of the fabricated base "casting"



And milling a bit more clearance for the tube in part of the leg

J

[oehrick]

Nice job Jason.

While I'm out of action on the other laptop, as an interim, a fair bit of my now defunct website 'The Old Engine House' is still visible through the double edged medium of the 'Wayback Machine' if you start here rather than from the homepage you should be able to see the Riches and Watts stuff as the links seem to work to some pages but not all - url is:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110107121140/http://oldenginehouse.users.btopenworld.com/oeh.htm

Don't take the History as authoritative, subsequent research has filled some gaps, corrected some inaccuracies and created even more questions!

BTW if anyone fancies a go at the 2nhp R&W there is a non dimensioned but scale drawing here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090324064947/http://oldenginehouse.users.btopenworld.com/rwdrawing.htm

from which Ed Bertschy developed a fiendishly simple looking working paper / card version, which he made available for download as a series of coloured pdf files which you can print off (there are a few Youtube vids off running examples), I seem to have lost track of his website but it is still posted on the ISSES site at:

http://www.isses.org/PaperModel/PaperModel.html

At   http://web.archive.org/web/20090415182011/http://oldenginehouse.users.btopenworld.com/bridewell.htm there are a few pics from the Bridewell Museum including a distant pic of a Tidman and more of the Tuxford beam engine ex Bagges Brewery which I see is being built on another thread. A few years back I surveyed and photographed the beam engine for a dear old chap in the USA called Jesse Livingstone who having seen the sister at the Ford Museum decided to make a model only to find they had sold it - anyhow he made patterns and cast (Ali) all the poured items and turned out a remarkable model - unfortunately about a year later I heard he had had a stroke, returned home and then no more - is it a name you have seen on this forum ?

Unfortunately the GME Tidman castings project didn't commence until after the website got frozen so don't appear.......

Hopefully the RHC Tidman vertical drg should attach, a different model and will not help much with the governor, but in terms of fixings and other aspects of their design, machining etc, should be useful. I was going to head for Bressingham's gallopers when detail needed as that is the same (unless they have sold that as well as everything else - Alan must be revolving at turbine speed  ) I'm on the trail of a copy of the book John Middlemiss co authored on fairground steam as he was deeply into info gathering, have a scan of an article RHC wrote for [can't remember mode], also have his notebook for an unwritten book on Tidmans but that's mainly diagrams of rides;

Delighted to hear Adrian has got the patterns in case of disaster - how has yours machined so far ? have only ground the flash off one set so far.
{edit - I'm an idiot, I see you say its a fabrication - duh}

I may drop in here a bit intermittently so don't take a slow reply as lack of interest 

Cheers

Rick

[Verbal D%&$£% mode off]

[Jasonb]

Thanks Richard, the penny has now dropped as to who you are, we did exchange a few e-mails a while back about RH Clark CDs which I would still be interested in if available.

There are quite a few similarities between the two Tidman engines so the drawing will come in handy.

I see that you are in Norfolk, David who is writing up his build of the Tidman castings will have the engine on show at Forncett's model engineers day if you felt like a look. Its on 4th October and a few forum members will also be there.

I have also sent you a private message which you should be able to pick up from the top of the page.

J

[DavidL]

Hello Rick,
 I had no idea that the exhaust would be configured as you described.  That solves a problem  As you can see from the print of my wip working drawing of the cylinder that I designed, the exhaust is in a odd spot.  I'll modify the design to include the exhaust as you describe.  The build has now reached the stage of govenor completion and I'm about to machine the crank shaft - should be fun.  I confess to buying the gears - I've yet to develop gear cutting skills.
I'm finding the discussion on Tidman and R&W engines facinating. 

Cheers
David

[Jasonb]

Yours is comming along well dave. These couple of photos may make it a bit clearer how the exhaust travels from the valve ports around the cylinder and then down one of the frame legs. Not sure if you will be able to fit it into your legs or not? Also I don't think the R&W put the steam down the leg, only the Tidman

David Owen's cylinder casting showing cast-in and cored steam passage.

A view from the other side of the Hollycoombe Tidman, you can see the small "bump" on the top of the A frame where the passage joins the cylinder

Pipe comming out the display base, as Rick says this would have gone straight down into the smokebox.

J

[Jasonb]

For anyone following along I thought it may be worth putting up a couple of photos to show how these engines were mounted.

Firstly a nice model of a Savage centre engine that was at the Guildford show a couple of years ago. The main engine, a compound in this case was used to turn the actual fairground ride and the small engines mentioned in this thread sat upfront on a bracket and were used to power the organ that played the fairground music.



Next photo shows how the centre engine was mounted to a waggon along with the pivot with all the geared drives to the horses etc at the top. When the fair arrived in town the red staging would have been leveled up with screwjacks and then the cart placed ontop.



Next the upper part of the ride was assembled, the cngine is under the tarp in this photo



finally the rest of the ride was added

[oehrick]

Hi David,

The Tidman is the only A frame engine that I have come across and noted the exhaust down leg feature, despite the efforts of Clarkson and others, Norfolk was well up in steam technology and R & W were head and shoulders above many of the others with their early use of expansion valves, shaft governing & tandem compounding and were serious exporters to the Antipodes and South America in particular - not bad for 12 fingered inbred's  They were also close to London 'state of the art' through Easton / Amos / Anderson in its various incarnations, who were retained by the R A S E as consulting engineers, they in turn put R & W in charge of providing steam and other services at Norwich RASE meetings; R & W also built marsh drainage engines to their design.

When the Vertical won awards at the Santiago (Chile) Exposition, several months later (pre steamship travel & postage) the local paper wrote a description of the works which, hopefully copying here does not conflict with any forum protocols but it is a fascinating snapshot.
Norfolk Chronicle, 13th May 1876.

RICHES & WATTS
HAVE Pleasure in informing their Friends and the Public they have just received, through their Agents at Santiago, in Chili.
3 PRIZE MEDALS
And the CERTIFICATES awarded them by the Jurors of the “Esposicion Internacional de Chile,” held in Santiago in September last.
The FIRST PRIZE for Six-Horse Power Vertical Combined ENGINE and BOILER.
The FIRST PRIZE for Improved New Pattern American GRIST MILL.
The THIRD PRIZE for Eight-Horse Power Portable STEAM ENGINE.
The above were subjected to trial by competent Judges, and most of the large houses in this country were represented.
CATALOGUES FREE ON APPLICATION.
DUKE’S PALACE IRON WORKS
NORWICH, MAY 10th, 1876.

This International success prompted an editorial feature in the same edition which gives us a rare glimpse of how the Dukes Palace Iron Works was equipped.

Engineering Success. – It is with pleasure that we observe from an advertisement in another column that Messrs. Riches and Watts, of this city, have taken three prize medals at the Chilean International Exhibition, held in Santiago, in September last, two of them being first prizes for a six horse power combined engine and boiler, and a new pattern American grist mill, and the other a third prize for eight horse power portable steam engine. We may also state that we have just had an opportunity of witnessing at the works of Messrs. Riches and Watts, Duke’s Palace, a very fine fly wheel for one of their compound engines of 18 feet diameter, and weighing complete more than 12½ tons. The method of constructing this wheel, we are informed, is such as was never before attempted in this part of the country, and is as follows: the boss or centre piece, four feet in diameter, is “bored out” in the periphery to receive the arms which are accurately turned to fit, and secured by massive folding keys; the outer ends of the arms are then turned in their places, and the rim (which is in six segments, each weighing 1½ tons) is then fitted by planing to its place; the rim itself being turned on its face and edged and polished. It has a very bold and handsome appearance, and nearly the whole of the work is machined. The lathe on which this piece of work is done is the largest of its kind in the eastern counties, wheels, &c., of 20 feet diameter, being turned on it with eaze.

Tidmans and Holmes the other leading SE makers had their own specialities and there seems to have been less secrecy amongst competitors, often sons were apprenticed to a rival firm and co operation or collaboration seems commonplace, when such a thing is recorded.

Richard

[Tennessee Whiskey]

JB, those last pics are just eye candy, beautiful   Are you sure your equipment is up to such a task

Cletus

[Jasonb]

Cletus, I thought the mention of 12 fingered inbreds would draw your attention to this thread. 

I'll just have to see what the old chinese junk can come up with. Just to make things easier I will be using a mixture of imperial and metric sizes and I have some non centre cutting bits that I have reground as centre cutting so not sure if I'm comming or going

J