Thanks very much everyone! It was a really fun project, and am continuing having fun playing with it. Jason, this one will be left unpainted, I like the look as it is.
As for the next project, been giving that a lot of thought. The shop elves have been back in their lab seeing what they can invent:
I'm not sure what that one is (they are not sure either!) so I went back to my list of possible builds. The top six on the current list are:
One each of the different design slew/crowd engines I have design for, from these brand steam shovels: Thew, Erie, Marion, and Bucyrus. They are all similar, but have different arrangements for the valving and crankshafts:
Another option is the Worthington Brewery Pump, a duplex pump variation that they made for breweries to pump beer between vats/kettles during the brewing process. The shop elves wanted to insist on this one, but I distracted them with a box of shiny bearings and they missed the final vote!
An engine that I drew up quite a while back was drawn from original Navy plans I found at the US National Archives, for the steering engine from the battleship Kearsarge. It would be a large engine, especially with all the other linkages/wheels, but they would not have to be there in the model. The gear train on this one is quite complex.
Recently I drew up this engine, a 7 cylinder steam radial with double acting cylinders. I have two versions of it, one with normal D valves that would run in one direction, the other has the 4-port/double layer slide valves like those in the slew/crowd steam shovel engines, which can be run in either direction with a second set of pipes and a control valve. This one would be quite fun!
Another one on the list was inspired by my cruise on the Liberty Ship in Baltimore not long ago, they had a flock of steam deck winches that look interesting. I found this design in an old patent from American Hoist And Derrick, and drew it up in CAD:
Finally there is this one, my own version of a steam steering engine. A couple years ago I built one based on the real one that Michael has, salvaged from a paddle steamer in Germany, that he very kindly supplied many pictures, measurements, drawings, and videos of. That one had the option for manual backup steering, and was a fairly complex design. This one that I have drawn recently is a more simplified design, based on ones used in Navy torpedo boats. It does not have a manual steering backup or a rudder position indicator (those were seperate items on those boats), and I've drawn it to use the 4-port slew/crowd engine valves so it also does not have piston valves. Its a nice compact model, the base is 6 inches on a side, with 1"x1" bore/stroke cylinders.
And the winner is.... The steering engine! Steering engines have intrigued me since I first saw one at the antique engine show at Mystic Seaport Museum, then built the one from Michaels original engine. There are many styles and sizes of them, and the feedback mechanism in them reminds me a lot of the radio-control servos, but are all mechanical rather than electronic. So, this build will start in a new thread today or tomorrow!
Thanks all for your comments/suggestions/jokes along the way on the crane build!
