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The Worlds most powerful Shay locomotive

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Dan Rowe:
The new Shay book came out and it has a lot of very good information no single book can cover the subject with any depth. I helped with the book as I was one of the original authors my work was on the mechanical database and checking early missing data with the drawing record. This gave me a very good working knowledge of the Lima Works drawing system. The research I did for the book was published in Steam in the Garden in a series of articles titled "The Nuts and Bolts of Shays".

Page 46 of the new Shay book has an error in the caption for S/N 909. This Shay did NOT have Allan link motion. It had Stephenson link motion and an Allen-Richardson balance slide valve.

On the same page the description of Gooch gear for S/N 2570 is not very accurate. The main difference between Stephenson valve gear and Gooch valve gear is the link is stationary in Gooch gear. To make this happen in the limited space the Gooch gear is folded and the link looks like a Stephenson link but it is stationary and the shifting link goes downward to the valve crosshead guide.

It also fails to mention that S/N 2570 had the largest steam engine used on a Shay locomotive 3 cylinders with 18" bore and 20" stroke. This was the most powerful Shay ever built and I had to research the engine. I have attached a reprint of the article I wrote about this Shay.

Cheers Dan

Edit fixed spelling Allan link motion not Allen link motion.

crueby:
Hi Dan,


That's very interesting!  I had never seen the Gooch gear before, let alone the folded version on that Shay. You are right, folding the valve's 'con rod' back down definitely shortens up the distance between the crankshaft and the cylinder.


Still getting my head around the nuances of the motions between the three gear setups, would be worth modelling up in CAD to animate it, with simple shapes to highlight the motions...


Very cool, thanks for sharing that!!


Chris

Kim:
Thanks Dan,
That is facenating!  Thank you for taking the time to post this.
Kim

Jo:
Thanks for that Dan,

Very interesting, the drawings in it are good enough to build from  :thinking:

Jo

PJPickard:
Thanks Dan, I've been waiting for this book for a LONG time! It is an excellent companion for my copy of Titan of the Timber bout for $20 when I was a teen!

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