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Marcher, a twin cylinder marine steam engine

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Moxis:
As I promised in the introduce section that I will start a build log of the Marcher engine, so here we are. After I also learned how to add photos here, we are ready to start.

First a few words for background.

A few months ago we decided with two friends to start building models of a half open launch "Lempi", which is a 60 feet long steam powered ship, made on 1879 at the Ahlstrom shipwright in Varkaus Finland. The drawings of the ships made by this company are all digitized, so the original drawings can still be found in Internet.
We downloaded the plans, had them printed in the scale of 1/15, whixh corresponds a model length of about 1200 mm and started working with the hull. I am not going more deeply to hull fabrication, but want to show a special way to cover the hull, because the original ship was made of iron by riveting, and we wanted to show the riveting also at the model hull.
So after the hull was made from wood in a common way by plank on bulkhead method, we covered it with 0,1 mm thick self adhering aluminium foil. where rivetings were made with a tool made from some old toy gear.

On first photos you can see the drawing of Lempi and a hull covered with alufoil.

Because the original ship was powered with a two cylinder compound steam engine, I wanted to have the model made the same way, and this led me to search suitable engines for this project. After many ponderings and calculations I finally selected the Marcher to be the engine for this project, and ordered set of drawings and castings from a UK company Reeves.

Ye-Ole Steam Dude:
Hi Moxis,

This will be a fun project/build to follow. The ship's hull that you built looks very nice and your shop looks as clean as an hospital operating room.

Have a great day,
Thomas

Baner:
I'll be following.:popcorn:
Is the Marcher going to be close to scale? Looks like it might be. Are you going to do a boiler too?

Dave.

Zephyrin:
this hull looks very nice, no visible bruising so easy to occurs with such thin foil !
how did you make the alu foil planking over the curved parts, with joined strips of metal ?

Moxis:
Thank you all for your kind comments and interest to my build.

# Thomas: Enclosed are a few photos about my machines which I am going to use to make the Marcher. They are a bit bigger than the hobby machines which are normally used for model making, but not "real" power tools which lot of you guys seem to have. However accuracy should be adequate for steam engine building, because it is easy to achieve 0,01 mm accuracy, which I have been using when making for instance gearboxes for my earlier builds. Or what do you people think, how accurate the parts shall be to be able to get a nicely working steam engine?

# Dave: Yes, the size of Marcher is quite near the scale size. However the original engine was a compound, but Marcher`s cylinders have equal bore. I tried to find drawings for a small compound engine but couldn`t find any.  And concerning the boiler, I have not decided yet whether to try to build it by myself or buy one. The problem is that I do not have equipment or skills enough to make rather large silver solderings which are necessary for boiler making. I have asked a few quotations for boilers, but it seems that they are quite pricey, so we will see when the time comes.

# Zephyrin: The hull planking is made using a number of alufoil plates, typically the size 40x90 mm. They overlap each other a few millimeters and are individually cut into the shape using first templates made of paper before cutting the final plate. This work sounds very demanding, but is in reality quite fun and easy, and planking the whole hull didn`t last many days. Because the plates are relatively small, they do not need to bend in two directions. It seems that the quality of this foil is quite soft, making it easy to  follow hull curves.

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