That isn't, by chance, Jim Tweto's suoer cub in that picture?
This thread started of looking for Parker steam engine info, but seems to have morphed into an Off Topic thread. The moderator can move it to OT if he deems fit. Hope none of the PP (Protocol Police) are too upset.
I have a lot of pictures but I'll be damned if I can access them since getting all the old stuff moved to this new computer. I have a lot more in the old format, remember when we went to the drug store to pic them up?
My old traction engine was a Peerless, but not unlike Case of that era. What the guy may have meant when he said the steam was used twice, was possibly in reference to the biggest of the Case engines that were tandem compound engines, where the steam exhausted from the high pressure cylinder into a larger, low pressure cylinder, then the steam would further expand, apply force on that piston. Large marine steam plants were multi cylinder engines where the steam went through many expansions as it passed from HP (smallest) to IP (sometimes 2 intermediate cylinders) finally into the LP, being the largest. The power of steam comes from it's expansion as it rapidly leaves the boiler, thru the cylinders. The old train wrecks could blow the whole side of a town away, if the water, under 150-250 PSI is sudden;ly allowed to reach 0 psi. What occupied a few hundred cubic feet, contained in a boiler at pressure, could become several thousand cubic feet if released to the atmosphere.
I only ran 160-180 pis in my steamboat boiler, but when the safety valve was opened, as a matter of procedure, the steam cloud up the escape pipe would go a few hundred feet into the air.
That single cylinder horizontal engine coupled to the dynamo is likely an oil engine (not quite a diesel) an had what was known as "hot tube" ignition, started by heated the tube with a torch, or oil flame. The tube was kept hot after the engine was running. It is likely (I sent the picture to an old engine friend. He's old, and loves old engines, having about 100) It's likely very valuable.
Here's a picture or two of an engine I passed onto an older friend, with the promise it comes back to me when he dies (hopefully before me, and I still have enough to buy it back from his wife) It was built pre civil war, probably 1845-1855, and may have been the oldest I ever had. It was probably the only 'small' engine I truely loved.
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10-21-2011, 06:54 PM
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