Sir William Armstrong's Hydraulic Pumping Engine 1870

[J.L.]

Hello,
My 19th century steam driven machine shop is nearing completion and I am beginning to have a wandering eye for another project. Immediate will probably be Anthony Mount's Benson's Vertical Engine, but I have always been drawn to the double cylinders and central flywheel of Armstrong's horizontal engine.

But Stuart has detailed the build with warnings about lost wax castings, poor laser cut parts, slim tolerances and poor customer service. Has anyone had another go at ordering the castings for this beautiful engine?

It looks like a great project. Mind you, as a novice, I go into this build with my eyes open. I will have to have much professional machine shop work along the way to make a go of it, but surely I can puddle about with some of the simpler parts.

Interested in hearing if Cotswold has improved the quality of their castings.

Cheers...John

[kvom]

The Armstrong certainly looks the simpler build, and other than the base the other parts looks fairly easy to make from bar stock if a casting is deficient.

Given that Benson is my family name I should have it on my todo list.

[Jo]

My set of the Castings are a few years old and they have all the features mentioned 

With the amount of profit made on a set of castings I cannot see it being economical to make a new set of patterns. I plan to replace all of the laser cut parts and the lost wax ones so it works out a very expensive casting set.

Jo 

[sco]

I also wanted to build this engine but was put off by all the negativity surrounding Cotswold.

Simon.

[Jasonb]

I have seen one made without any castings so that is another option, a halfway measure would be to buy the main casting set A and not bother with the lost wax castings as all those parts can be fabricated as that is how Anthony did it.

[Jo]

That's Tony's engine 

This is set A £245: The Ali base, CI bits and bevel gears are worth having.

Jo

[Jasonb]

I thought the bevel gears were in pack C

It is quite a pleasing layout and there are some other old engines that were similar but without the pump, I have a couple of images in teh "future projects" folder that I may get round to doing at some time. Jo has the advantage over me by having pre rusted barstock to hand

[Jo]

I thought the bevel gears were in pack C

  Yes I forgot I knocked those up when I had nothing better to do.

Jo

[steve-de24]

Jason, some lovely design features on the two old steam engines in your pics. I hope someone gives them the attention they deserve to get them functioning again.  Steve