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Any thoughts yet on your next build?
Hi Gary, great to see it running on steam with your boiler. Certainly appropriate to be basking in the glory of that first run.I believe it will already be worthwhile taking off the nut and spring to remove the cylinder and closely inspect the port face, I think you will already be able to see if the wear pattern is even around the ports or not. I have found that each of my oscillating engines benefited from some extra work on the port faces of both the cylinder and the standard. I hesitate to call it lapping, I used 800 grade wet and dry, possibly even 1000. Some will probably say not fine enough, but I found it wears in quite quickly from there. I also tried Brasso on the face, assembled the spring to hold the faces together while I turned the engine by hand. An electric drill might have been better for this. Not sure whether brasso is course or fine compared with the wet and dry. I only had a machined wooden block with a hole for the pin to back the abrasive, and punched a hole on the paper so it would lie flat. With that stand, you might have to square off the end of a dowell in the lathe and drill it for a wood locating pin, and again punch a hole in the paper. Obviously both surfaces have to be flat to seal.As far as I remember you don’t have a superheater so the boiler only produces saturated steam. Then that long copper tube makes quite a nice condenser, so the engine is probably seeing very wet steam. That may be increasing the dramatic effect of the leakage. Perhaps it would be worth setting the engine on a block and trying a quite short pipe, insulated by wrapping with strips of rag. Might help a little, though port face sealing is the key. Then a little exhaust separator to reduce the water condensing everywhere.Looking forward to seeing the next build. I also tried a double acting one before I started on the slide valve ones.MJM460