JimH

Been lurking/laughing for a bit and thought I'd better join. Being terminally incapable of looking after cars and being married to someone who makes me look anally retentative when it comes to looking after cars the daily runners are more stomach turning than head turning this place makes me smile a lot.
 
Even when I buy something decent it turns to mud in my hands. My VX220 was bought new and now is a 90,000 mile barn find. The Dolomite Sprint sits on the lift unused and unloved because I'm just not a polisher. There are a number of projects in the pending file that were bought to save them from rotting away on someone else's driveway. X1-9 Lido and a round dash 944 both waiting for care and attention when a suitable hole in the schedule appears.
 
So why really CBA approach to cars in general and daily transport in particular? Because most spare time not devoted to rebuilding houses is spent turning things like this:
 
 

 
Into this with our own fair hands:
 

 
And this:
 

 
 
Into this:
 

 
The current project is to make this (note Autoshite friendly LDV crew cab pick up)
 

 
Look a lot like this (except with windscreens and pneumatic tyres)
 

 
Which is progressing nicely. The question then is "why don't you just f**k off to one of those forums where they talk about steam engines then?" Well, people who are into steam engines are weird and take the wrong things too seriously and I'm not like that. Obviously.
 
It the process of digging those pictures out I found a picture of a charming Omega dog kennel which was bought a while back for very little for Dearheart and two years later was scrapped because it was a mobile health hazard. Note AS friendly LDV again.
 

 
Anyway, hello.
 
 

{ring ring}
 

 
Good afternoon, Stupid & Co, how may I help?
 

 
'Yeah, alright love, can you still do owt I want?'
 
What in your mind you can tap, we'll make look really crap.
 
'Oh, nice one. Can I have John Leslie, Ian Durie and Mr Bean on me Vespa panel, please?'
 

 
Anything else, boss?
 
'Yeah, I'll have the two lads out of 'Twin Town' with a black eyed Cliff Richard who's just had a bath with his toaster, pls'
 

 
Anything else, chief?
 
'Hey that's brill thx M8. Erm, tell you what, on the tool box door I'll have Art Garfunkle, Casper the fucking ghost and David Hasselhoff, please'
 
Be ready Wednesday, ace.
 

 
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vespa-PX200-Disc-2001-Custom-Scooter-The-Jam/192714739768?hash=item2cdeb19038:g:g7MAAOSwrGlb4aA~:rk:5:pf:0

The tale of Mr and Mrs Docker is entertaining. Good enough place to start is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_Daimlers
 
If they were to have appeared on Mr and Mrs with Derek Batey I reckon they would have won the £15 jackpot.
 
So Bernard, Norah can't hear you - she's in the soundproof booth. Don't be nervous. So Bernard, you need to buy a present for Norah. What do you think she would like most? Would she like flowers - all ladies like flowers don't they? Would she like chocolates or would she like to be made director of a coachbuilding firm that you have bullied the board of directors into purchasing so she is able to spend an almost insane sum of money creating some of the most gauche vehicles ever built in the UK then turn up to the motor show wearing a coat paid for by your company which cost the equivalent of several assembly line workers' houses?

Been lurking/laughing for a bit and thought I'd better join. Being terminally incapable of looking after cars and being married to someone who makes me look anally retentative when it comes to looking after cars the daily runners are more stomach turning than head turning this place makes me smile a lot.
 
Even when I buy something decent it turns to mud in my hands. My VX220 was bought new and now is a 90,000 mile barn find. The Dolomite Sprint sits on the lift unused and unloved because I'm just not a polisher. There are a number of projects in the pending file that were bought to save them from rotting away on someone else's driveway. X1-9 Lido and a round dash 944 both waiting for care and attention when a suitable hole in the schedule appears.
 
So why really CBA approach to cars in general and daily transport in particular? Because most spare time not devoted to rebuilding houses is spent turning things like this:
 
 

 
Into this with our own fair hands:
 

 
And this:
 

 
 
Into this:
 

 
The current project is to make this (note Autoshite friendly LDV crew cab pick up)
 

 
Look a lot like this (except with windscreens and pneumatic tyres)
 

 
Which is progressing nicely. The question then is "why don't you just f**k off to one of those forums where they talk about steam engines then?" Well, people who are into steam engines are weird and take the wrong things too seriously and I'm not like that. Obviously.
 
It the process of digging those pictures out I found a picture of a charming Omega dog kennel which was bought a while back for very little for Dearheart and two years later was scrapped because it was a mobile health hazard. Note AS friendly LDV again.
 

 
Anyway, hello.
 
 

If any one is interested in other stuff we've done and simply cannot wait for the next exciting update take a look here: http://hmvf.co.uk/topic/8226-another-pioneer/
 
It's the log of the restoration of a 1945 Scammell Pioneer we did a while back. I managed to keep this record pretty complete except for towards the end where it should become clear why there was a bit of a jump.

In the last episode the gears had returned fron Leek Gears and the bushes had been removed fro the crankshaft. Large chunks of bronze were then reduced to swarf to make new bushes. This pile here represents everything needed to make the differential for a Super. Ignore the black things. They are plastic supports for the drive shafts while things are being fitted up. Last episode I went on about shinking bushes in. This is a right old pain to do because it's helpful to have a supply of liquid nitrogen which is tricky or you need to heat things that you aren't entirely happy with heating. On top of that once you have fitted the bush you need to finish bore it.
 
However, on its white charger Modern Progress appears over the horizon in the shape of engineering adhesives. Now you fit the bush to the shaft and leave it slightly under sized so it slips into the housing. Then once you are happy with how everything fits you pop on some posh glue and wait for it to set. Brilliant. However, the world of engineering adhesives is a bit complicated and you need to know which ones to use and where. Spec sheets start to get quite long and weary. Still brilliant, though. 
 

 
An almost complete water pump set up. Idler gear complete with eccentric, machined con rod, new pump ram (not yet machined to length) and bottle. There is a very important and complicated bit missing but we were still trying to talk to someone in Aus about one they were having cast. The pump ram has been made as big as we can get it into the body. This means we can get more water into the boiler.
 

 
About this point the milling machine broke. I believe that before we got it the thing had sat outside for a short time. I seems that water got into the quill bearing and it gave up the ghost. These are fiddly little buggers to work on but here it is returned to full health.
 

 
Close up of a tappet once it came out of the bead blaster. This one is one of the better ones. Not pretty. A little care and attention should return them to if not factory fresh at least a decent impression of it.
 

 
And the same tappets and lock plates fitted to the crank case. These are polished at the moment but they should be chemically blackened so they look right. Just another four to do.
 

 
And if we zoom out we can see that the crankshaft has been trial fitted. This point of all this was we needed to measure the positions of the push rods so the manifolds were fitted to the cylinders in the right place. We also needed to get the piston rods the right length.
 

 
And here's a cylinder being machined. Our boring machine isn't bad but it doesn't have a live spindle which makes it a bit of a faff at times. If anyone has one with a live spindle looking for a new home for not much let me know and I'll be there tonight to pick it up. Note writing all over it so no one gets confused about which end is which.
 

 
Bored and faced. Just the sticky problem of the ports to go. And a few other things.
 

 
We did a job for a now defuct paper maker. Well, they were already defunct which was why we were doing the job. Because we were on site at the time we were allowed to have a trolley dash in what was left of their metals store. In the end we probably got a ton and a half of flat, round and hex bar as well as handy bits of pipe. Here is some of it carefully stored under the Goddess.
 

 
Non-ferrous cuttings bin. Turning down flanged bushes from cored bar causes a lot of these. We weigh them in occassionally in a pathetic attempt to make it look like we are saving money.
 

 
And this is the pile of steel and cast iron turnings generated over a weekend.
 

 
The final part of the diff jigsaw is the sprocket carriers. These hubs have the drive sprockets bolted to them. Take piece of stock bar and machine it until you have (i) one of these and (ii) a pile like the one above. Note shiny tappets.
 

 
The pile gets bigger and a lot less depressing.
 

 
Con rods with new big ends and little ends. New bolts for the big ends not yet made.
 

 
My old man does a lot of this. He likes writing lists so he can score things off. I tend to be a bit more slap dash in my approach to planning projects. There are a lot of white boards in the workshops.
 

 
Yet another long LDV drive to pick up some new (to us anyway) bending rolls. The poor LDV gets used a lot. Note yet another whiteboard in background.
 

 
And *drum roll* the finished differential fitted to the crankshaft. Important piece of progress this. If you understand that the sprocket carriers spin freely on the crankshaft you should be able to get how it works. One of the downsides of this design is that you can't lock it which was a lot handier then than it is now. The other disadvantage is that it is massively heavy and expected to spin at about 1400 RPM max.
 

 

 
One of the problems with the documenting what we do it that we are utterly piss poor at stopping to take photos so the record is a bit stilted to say the least. I've just been working through what few photos I've uploaded to Flickr over the past couple of years. This comes back to bite us time after time because we spend a lot of time wondering out loud "what did we do with the last one?" but because it was twenty years ago you can't remember. You end up scratching around a few photos searching for clues about what you did. Stuff pings into your head at three in the morning too. The point is that the next photo I uploaded is this one.
 

 
Oh. That's a bit of a jump. Cylinders finished and honed. Manifolds fitted, clad and the whole damn thing put together. Do you not think we could have got it together to take a few photos in all that time? No, apparently. Anyway. Here's a nearly finished Super Sentinel engine. We are in the process of setting the timing.
 
Closer on the cylinders and valves. Nothing polished or painted. Inlet valves at the top, exhaust at the bottom.
 

 
Compare this shot with the one when it arrived.
 
 

 
And we'll leave it at that today. Now the engine is somewhere near finished we need to start doing bits it needs to be a lorry.
 
 

Oh joy. Another update. You see that thing that looks a bit like a cylinder all covered in old cladding and asbestos? No hope for that but it will live again as a pattern. A bit of a cheat I am afraid but we only need to make two of them. The foundry hated us for this.
 

 
And slightly less cheating, this is the pattern for the water pump con rods. Water pumps in steamers are expected to do a bit more work than in your Acclaim so they are a bit more butch.
 

 
One of the things we were struggling with was that there was a bit of a hole in the lathe capability. The shafts for the diff were all made in EN24 which seems to need fairly high cutting speeds. The Swift couldn't spin that fast and the Colchester Student wasn't big enough. The problem is that people are only just discovering that the amazing Bristol Churchill Imperial lathe buit in Qingdao for three and six wasn't quite the amazing bargain they thought it was so half way decent lathes are getting expensive again. Most dealers want £5-7K for a Colchester Triumph these days depening on spec. We managed to fine this one for a fraction of that. Mainly because it had very little kit with it and there had been a rather shoddy repair to the clutch and input shaft.
 

 
This is it in the process of being taken to bits. Once it is done we will be able to spin things quite fast. I'm not a massive fan of Colchester lathes but go and take a look at what a Dean Smith and Grace or Lang will set you back and you'll see why we'll just have to live with it. In the end it needed only a set of guide rollers for the clutch bought for it. We were able to make everything else. This was good because Colchester spares are terrifyingly expensive. A tiny padded envelope arrives with three tiny rollers in it. Doesn't seem a very fair swap for the four hundred notes you handed over for them.
 
Various manifolds cleaned up and waiting for their new valves. Also in that pile are some crankcase breathers a pair of cam gear covers and a pair of gland followers for the water pump.
 

 
This is what came back from the foundry. Some vaguely cylinder shaped lumps of cast iron. These will need a lot of machining to turn them into something that actually works. Lots of things that if we were doing it properly would be cored so things like ports would already be there. However, we will have to rely on man hours to machine them instead. You see that mutant lump of cast iron sitting next to a cylinder? That is one of the three balance weights from the crankshaft. Lump of brass lower right is another project. I'll show you that later.
 

 
Some more bits back from the foundry. New cylinder heads and a water pump con rod. Also visible are a pair of finished drive shafts and a piston.
 

 
 
Eventually the crankshaft came back from the grinders. We can do a lot of things but crank grinding is not one of them. Now the work of rebuilding it can begin. You see the bronze bushes? They are all buggered and need replaced. Note the finished quality of the crankshaft forging. This is why I get annoyed when people tell me, "They don't build them like they used to, eh?". No, we build them properly now.
 

 

 
Another important bit. A casting for the water pump. It also came with a ram but it is worn and too small so we'll need a new one of them. This Super is being built with a high volume water pump 'cos that will mean we can go faster for longer (go faster = need more steam = need more water).
 

 
Spot the difference? The bushes have gone. A trivial change but took a while to do. Bushes are usually made with an interference fit so you shrink them in liquid nitrogen or heat the thing into which they are fitting. Then when things return to the normal temperature everything stays put. However, getting them back out is a bit of a bugger. The usual approach is to pop the thing in the lathe/boring machine and machine them off center until the bush collapses. A bit tricky in this case so we opted to cut them very carefully by hand. See the yellow macine hacksaw blade on the floor? Took a while but we got there.
 

 
And this is some of what came out. The big ones are the main bearings. They were machined off centre. Now we jus need to make one of everything and it can all go back together.
 

 
Another bit. This is the foot valve for the steam brake. Steam brakes are awesome - beautiful controllable linear things that ooze feel.
 

 
Woo yay! Finished things. These came back from Leek Gears. Teeth are all flame harded. A very pleasing sight and no mistake.
 

 

 
You know how when you go to some seaside town there are horse and carriages clip clopping up and down the front? These days people seem to get all arsey about horse cack all over the place so there is usually some sort of turd catch tray at the back end of Dobbin. This is the same sort of idea. This is the ash pan. Catches the ashes as they fall through the grate. Actaully it was more about controlling draught on the fire rather than keeping the front at Skeg tidy.
 

 
There was now a lot of machining to do. Here is a nearlyfinished big end being fitted to the crank journal. You do an lot of work to make things fit. This is why fitters are called fitters. Lego man appears in the next few photos because someone somewhere else whined that there was no idea of scale. The sharp eyed will notice that the bolts are too short. This is because we are using the old bolts here. New ones are being made elsewhere in the workshop.
 

 
And this is the first dry fit of the crankcase and trunk guides. A lot of measuring needs to go on to get the cylinders right. Measure nine times, get someone else to measure another dozen times, give it one final check, then measure twice more for luck, cut once. There are a lot of things need to be in the right place. Front axle C bracket just sitting there for some reason.
 

 
The other big end being machined.
 

 
A nice oh it might be finished one day bit. A pair of reproduction waggon plates. Lists all of the patents the waggon was built under. An act of supreme corporate arrogance because no one was going to copy them. Ever. Sentinel would have been better off trying to patent a Gardner LW engine.
 

 
Bottle for the water pump. This smooths out the flow. A bit. Promise.
 

 
And finally the spring slippers being machined in the shaper. Shapers are very under rated machines. You can do a lot with them.
 

 
Looking forward in the photostream next time things start to look even more finished and the crankshaft ends up looking like it did in that photo I put up earlier.
 
 

Let's start this catch up with a bit of history. Right back at the start I mentioned the Standard. The Standard was a simple device and a tough wee bugger. A typically overloaded Standard, yesterday.
 

 
Brown Bailey ran their Standards, massively (and I mean massively) overloaded into the 1960s. If you know the Glasgow Transport Museum you'll know one of Brown Bailey's Standards.
 
It may look crude to our eyes but in comparison with what went before it was pretty bloody awesome. One day people will look at our Scanias and laugh in the same way. Anyway, the Standard was so brilliant that they sold thousands of them and Sentinel made a lot of money. By the 1920s sales were tailing off and money was getting tight which is why the new improved Super was developed. However, it was clear by then that despite their best efforts steam was not going to be viable as road haulage for very much longer so they needed to diversify. One of the things they went into was railway engines. In order to minimise risks they didn't leap headlong into building proper locos but instead chose to use as many bits from the waggons as possible. This restricted what they could build to shunters and, slightly later, rail cars. This is the quite late Sentinel Shunter that lives in the NRM
 

 
The Super engine sits vertically at the front and drive through a chain. The boiler (much bigger than the waggons in this case) is in the cab. There is a bigger version of this one in preservation that uses two Super engines. Sentinel shunters were actually quite successful and were built into the late 1950s. If you rake round most railway preservation places you'll almost certainly find one rotting into the weeds.
 
What is the point of all this wittering about railway engines? Well, the engines were the same as the waggons with one or two key differences namely they had a solid forged crankshaft and a differently shaped crankcase. They also ran pressure fed lubrication to mains and big ends. Why this development didn't make it onto the waggons is lost on me. They also had a slightly different (but significantly better) manifold arrangements but it is just too boring to go into that here. The upshot is that if you need a few bits for an engine then one of the first places to start is your friendly neighbourhood railway preservation yard. And we had one of those just down the road and it had not only a few shunters but also a very large pile of brand new spares. This would be just what we needed. In the end we came away with what we needed in exchange for a not exactly trivial sum of money. What will become clear over the next couple of photos is that we didn't have a great deal of choice.
 
Probably the most important missing pieces were the camshafts. Not satisfied with talk of railway things let's have a bit of talk about the mechanics of steam engines - apologies to anyone who is being taught to suck eggs. The reciprocating steam engine has many benefits but it also has some limitations.  One of those limitations is addressed by giving it variable valve timing. On a piston valve or slide valve engine this is a pretty simple task which involves some sort of linkage - and there are lots of different types of linkage - controlled by the operator. What you are doing is controlling for how much of the piston's stroke you admit steam. To produce lots of torque you need a lot of steam so to start, for example, you will run at 90% cut off. That is admit steam for almost all of the stroke. As speed builds you need to admit steam for less and less of the stroke. The shortest cut off may be as little as 20%. The other thing is that you often need to run a steam engine in reverse so altering the valve timing allows you to do that to. All very easy to understand and handy.
 
However, the Super engine, like most undertype steam waggons from most manufacturers (Yorkshire being a notable exception), uses poppet valves (the same kind of thing as what your car uses) operated by a camshaft. If you have a camshaft how do you engineer variable valve timing? These days there are many ways of doing it and through the years various engineers have come up with all sorts of elegant solutions.
 
What we are talking about here is not elegant at all. The solution is that you have multiple lobes on each camshaft then as you want to change the cut off or go backwards you drag the camshafts from one lobe to another. Hmmmm. To illustrate here is the first prize from the trolley dash. It is a brand new, still in its waxed paper exhaust camshaft. My little beady eyes lit up when I saw this.
 

 
You have an inlet and an exhaust camshaft. Twin cam, four valves per cylinder and VTEC. There is nothing new under the sun. Each valve has four lobes. Two forward cut offs, a drain position (all valves held open) and a reverse. Because shunters tend to go forward as much as they go backwards the shunter camshafts have two forward, a drain and two reverse. Later DG and S Types waggons got three forward cut offs. Each one of the bumps you see is a lobe of a different grind. The long slot at the end take the drive dogs from the cam gears. It is long because the camshaft needs to slide within its drive gear.
 
This is a close up of some lobes. You may be able to make out the two forward - drain - two reverse lobes for each valve. Making these would have been tricky so it was a huge step forward to get them.
 

 
This is someone else's photo of the inside of their Sentinel shunter crankcase. It gives a pretty good idea of how things work. The engine sat upright in the shunters so they added a little tray underneath the camshafts so they always ran in oil. The things poking down are the tappets.
 

 
Enough about valves what else did we get? These are the inlet manifolds linked by the steam inlet pipe. These were overhauled spares which were nice because everything was there. Even though the valves were new they won't be used because the steel used by Sentinel was absolutely hopeless and valve seat life was close to non-existent. New ones in the right steel will be used (you'll like them when we get to them).
 

 
A pair of exhaust manifolds. You might see that one has been dropped at some point and bent the valve stem. Hardly a disaster but it broke the valve guide too. A little bit of remedial work required.
 

 
Valve adjusters. These screw onto the end of the valves and allow the clearances to be adjusted.
 

 
A pair of new pistons. Very nice. The log shaped thing is the exhaust manifold link pipe.
 

 
And lastly for the store shed was a pile of new piston rings.
 

 
There are still a few key components missing so we had to venture into the undergrowth to find the sorry remains of the two used, incomplete and mostly buggered spare engines to get the rest.
Our luck was in and one of the engines had one of its cylinders still on. This is well and truly knackered but it can be used as the basis for a pattern so that is good enough. That is the old piston next to it. We had to cut through the piston rod to get the cylinder off.
 

 
A pile of tappets. Hopefully from this pile there will be eight that can be pressed into service.
 

 
Camshaft gear train. The big one is the idler that is driven by the crankshaft and the smaller pair are the camshaft drive gears. They sit on bronze carriers which allow the camshaft to slide relative to the gear. The big bronze eccentric on the large idler gear is what drive the water pump.
 

 
This is what Honda copied to make their VTEC engines. There are forks inside this cast iron housing which engage with the camshafts. This allows the driver to move the camshafts to the desired position. You don't need to know too much about steam engines to know that using poppet valves is a really, really stupid thing to do. Suffice to say when Abner Doble designed his cutting edge steam cars and lorries he did not use poppet valves.
 

 
And the last piece of the jigsaw. A cylinder head. Only one sadly so we'll need to make another. The big bronze valve is a relief valve. If you get it wrong and overfill the boiler water can get carried over into the engine. This is called priming and it can also happen under other conditions. Priming is very bad news for a steam engine and usually results in people looking very sad and/or gulty and wondering just how all this broken thing can be made better. However, a decent relief valve at either end can save the situation. Waggons didn't have RVs but locos did. We'll keep the RVs on this one.
 

 
That will do for this time. In the next installment we go back to making patterns, a new lathe appears and some things start to look finished.

It looks like we have a number for the engine. We know which scrap dealer the engine came from before it ended up in Mr Keeley's yard and people have a good idea what went through that dealer's yard so we are pretty sure it is the engine from waggon 6982 which is a later waggon dating from 1927. It was first owned by Kelvin Transport in Alexandria (the one near Glasgow rather than the Egyptian one) so it has come back quite close to home. Hopefully we can get enough together to get an age related plate. We don't get that bent out of shape about original numbers. There is a reason for this but I won't go on about it.
 
Repairing/manufacturing is about the standards that are applied. If it is a "repair" then the standard that is applied is one that relates to the original design. This in itself can cause problems because getting hold of superceded BS documents  can be tricky. If it is manufactured then you apply the standards of the day. Personally speaking if I am sitting next to a large pressure vessel at 255psi then I'd like the very highest standards applied please. This place is fairly open so I won't vent my spleen on the subject of bodging 100 year old boilers back together on a wing and a prayer. It wouldn't be very interesting, either.
 
Our boilers are built to BS5750, certified by Lloyds and carry a CE mark which is what any pressure vessel needs to carry if you want to sell it commercially. We are engineers with a petro-chems background so documenting/manufacturing pressure vessels is something of which we have a little knowledge. Suffice to say a properly designed, manufactured and documented pressure vessel should have no problem getting insurance in future. I am not sure this is going to remain the case for all pressure vessels.
 
Finally, most of what John Keeley bought ended up as scrap in sheds and hedgerows. There were two sales - one of his motorbike collection which got a bit of coverage and one of everything else. The catalogue of his "collection" is still online.It gives the impression of a man who just bought anything.
 
https://www.i-bidder.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/cheffinsov/catalogue-id-cheffi1-10039

Most of this project involves turning large chunks of metal into turnings. In period many bits would have been cast in steel. However, that involves pattern making which is fine if you are making hundreds. For one or two you start with a billet and a big lathe. Here is the start of the drive gear blanks.
 

 
And here are some of the bits. The torque the engine can produce is frightening so these components are under some fairly scary loads. These are all made from EN24 which should hopefully be up to the job. What you can see here is an old drive shaft, two new drive shafts and two new diff pinions (the smaller ones with a lump at one end. The lump is the blank for the gear.
 

 
And here is a mostly assembled steering box. You can probably guess which end the steering wheel goes on. Note the lightweight* construction. You can just about lift this on your own.
 

 
More castings. This is the quadrant for the reversing lever and hand brake. The one at the back was a wrecked old one which was faked up with filler and wood. The one at the front is the aluminium casting taken from the pattern. They used aluminium because it was lightweight. This is like BMW bragging that the 5 Series has lightweight aluminium suspension and completely forgetting to tell you that each front seat weighs over a hundredweight.
 

 
And these lump of cast steel are the spring hangers. At the front the springs are anchored at the front (the hangers nearest the camera) and at the rear end of the spring it sits on a slipper than run on a dovetailed plate. The rear springs sit on slippers at both ends and the axle is located by a stout radius rod. This allos you to move the rear axle to get the chain tension right. So there are two fixed hangers and six floating slippers. A pattern got made for both types.
 

 
Detail of a floating slipper
 

 
This is some of the bits of the engine. The thing that looks like a piston is called a cross head. The thing fixed to the cross head is the con rod. You will probably spot that the construction isn't exactly Cosworth. The other big lump of metal is the stuffing box. This carries the glands that keep the steam and oil where they are supposed to be. The rusty bar in two pieces is one of the piston rods. Yet more metal to be turned into swarf to make new ones.
 

 
A delivery of metal. What is lying on this pallet is all the bar to make the shafts and gears for the differential. There is also the metal for the front axle hubs and the engine sprocket carriers. Once upon a time getting material like this was an absolute nightmare. Now were have forward thinking suppliers who will send you what you want in the spec you want and (really important this one) without you having to buy a full length of the stuff. We live in good times.
 

 
Pattern making was now in full swing. If you look up the page to the extract from the parts book for the front axle you will see the axle beam and two other lumps which are the swivels. These take the stub axles and allow them to be swung. The "pins" top and bottom is what they rotate on and the big funny shaped lumps take the bolts to fix the steering arms too. This design was another of Sentinel's "improvements". They also patented it so no one could copy it. I think this was Sentinel's idea of a joke.
 

 
Yet more castings. One big end was missing and the other was unsurprisingly shot. We took the old one and carefully built it up with filler to make a pattern. These are the bronze castings made from that pattern. The thing that looks like a scoop is a scoop for scooping up oil in a desperate attempt to keep the bearing surfaces oiled. This is what passed for engineering back then.
 

 
Enough of the castings already. I told you it would be a castings day. These are the C brackets for the front axle. These bolt to the axle beam and carry the lower bearing for the swivel above. You have probably worked out by now that there is a fairly mammoth machining effort looming.
 

 
Last bit of the axle jigsaw puzzle are the steering arms. These were drop forged originally but we'll have to start with steel castings. It will start to become apparent how this pile of raw castings join together to make a finished axle.
 

 
This is where we came in. The finished diff gear blanks. We can handle most stuff in our own workshop but gear hobbing is not one of the things we are set up for. The six blanks were taken to Leek Gears who are in Leek and machine gears. On top of that they are smashing, helpful people and I recommend them for all your gear cutting requirements.
 

 
That's enough tedium for one post. Next time we win* a trolley dash at the local railway preservation place and come away with most of the bits we need for the engine. Or at least bits we can use to make non-knackered bits.
 
 

So where are we? By this point the list looked a bit like:
 
Boiler
Superheater
Chimney base
Injector
Most of the steering box
A steering wheel
Windscreen hinges
Ash pan
Tank filter boxes
Feed heater box and lid
A vague idea what we are up to
 
When we built the last one we started with an engine and then fretted about making axles and boilers and the rest of it. Now we were pretty happy that the rest of it could be built but the engine was going to be a problem. What Sentinel built was a fairly standard twin cylnder, double acting engine with poppet valves operated from camshafts (we'll come to them later). Where things got odd is that the Super has a twin chain drive. There is a sprocket on both ends of the crankshaft driving a chain to a sprocket on each rear wheel.
 
Errr, where are we going to put the differential?
 
After much head scratching they come up with one of the more mental ideas in vehicle design. We'll put it in the crankshaft. And in a stroke they made what would have been a difficult job of making an engine very much harder. So there was humming and hawing and then as is usually the case if you think about a problem for long enough someone solves it for you. The widow of John Keeley died and there was a big auction of all the stuff he had amassed over his life. One of the lots was the remains of a sorry looking Super engine minus lots of bits. Fortunately there was a crankcase and - most importantly - a crankshaft. The old man trooped down there with the intention of buying it come what may. A coupe of weeks later we had to do an 850 mile round trip in the LDV to pick it up. Here it is, upside down, on a pallet. The big bits that are missing are the cylinders, the camshafts, all of the valve gear and the water pump. Still, we stand a chance of getting a waggon number if we can identify it.
 

 
Peering through the crankcase door you can glimpse the crankshaft. Pretty much everything you can see is buggered.
 

 
Hosed down and on the workshop floor things look a bit better.
 

 
So you take it to bits and have a look. This is the crankshaft stripped of all its shafts and gears.
 

 
To give some idea of scale those are 3.5 tonne axlestands it is sitting on. Two people can just lift the bare crank. One of the avenues we explored was having a crankshaft made by LCR (who are an amazing company who can do some well impressive stuff) because it is way beyond our workshop capability. The estimate from LCR was that to manufacture what you are looking at there less the balance weights would be £14,000 plus yer dreaded, mate. When you saw what they were doing for the money we had no argument with the price. The problem was that it was £14K FFS. 
 
Just to jump forward a little so you can see what it is meant to look like this is the same crankshaft once we'd finished it. I'll fill in how it got to be like this but it should give an idea of how it works. The large lumps of metal on each end of the crank are the partially machined sprocket carriers. These spin freely on the crankshaft and are driven by shafts that pass the the hollow journals. It is unbelieveably heavy by this point. You see the massive main bearings? It needs them.
 

 
However, jump back to a close up on a couple of the diff gears. You can probably see that they are buggered.So the crank needed all new bushes (8 off), new drive shafts (2 off), new master gears (2 off) new diff pinions (2 off) and new diff gears (2 off). On top of that it needed to have the big end journals reground which we can't do so it had to go to the engine remanufacturers to be reground and that took a while for it to come back.
 

 
So from this exercise we have a very long list of things that need to be made/found to turn this into a working engine. However, work carries on other things. The steering box, cover, top bearing housing  and crank are were all done so now it needed the shaft and nut made. This is a left handed, two start ACME thread at 1" pitch which is a bit of a tall order to machine. Its a good thing the old man has had a bit of practce making these now so that wasn't too bad (for me - it took him several days). You need to cut a square thread first then go in with an ACME form tool so you need to kep your wits about you. These days threads like this would be rolled (and beautiful they would be too) but this is an oddball one so you would need to spring for the cost of the dies which is a no no.
 

 
Meh, not bad I suppose...
 

 
And this is the start of the front axle. The bend in the middle is so it goes around the boiler. Originally these were forged but we don't have a massive hammer so the approach we have taken was to make a pattern and have them cast in steel. Then we simply* weld them together in the middle. This also solves the problem of machining the axle since the whiole axle won't fit in our boring machine.
 

 
This is an extract from the parts book. Gives you a bit of an idea what the front axle beam is meant to look like.
 

 
And some long lengths of channel were delivered. You will be a chassis one day soon.
 

 
That will do for now. In the next thrilling installment some things are cast and other things are machined.

So where do you start? The same place as last time. Get the spare parts book and start scoring things off.
 

This is the page for the rear axle. All you need is one (or two) of everything and you are home and dry. The well of spare parts is pretty much dry so you are on your own. Almost everything will need to be made. Fortunately one bit which would be very difficult to make is the injector. Through dumb luck we managed to get one.
 

 
The injector uses steam at boiler pressure to force water into the boiler (I have no idea how). Normally the engine driven water pump does that but if you are stationary then you need an injector. How injectors work is pretty much a black art as far as I can see. The other bits in the picture are the raw castings for the windscreen hinges.
 

 
Exciting, huh? These are two raw castings for the water tank filter boxes. Each one will soak up many hours' of machine time. Another part we got early was a chimney base. The exhaust from the engine exits up the chimney to provide induced draft on the fire. Don't worry, there will be some recognisable bits along soonish.
 

 
Also quite early we managed to get a casting for a steering box. Here is the box in the boring machine.
 

 
The throttle valve partially machined and bolted to the boiler shell.
 

 
A boiler non return valve in its raw state.
 

 
And this is another part of the throttle valve. It's called the dump valve and it makes a "Phsssssttttt" noise when you use it. The idea is that because the throttle opens and closes by hand you have a foot pedal which dumps the steam straight up the chimney away from the engine. This is handy for moving around slowly but also it is your OMG emergency brake. According to the operator's manual when things are grim you step on the dump valve, drag the engine into reverse and let go of the dump valve. The handbok describes this as "To stop almost instantaneously at risk of snashing the engine".
 

 
This is the feed heater. The exhaust steam passes through this box as the boiler feedwater is fed through a coil inside. This improves efficiency.
 

 
Things start to look a little more finished than others. Here is the crank arm for the steering box.
 

 
And here is a more finished steering box and cover.
 

 
Front and rear towing eyes. Some nice chap had a pattern made for one and we cadged the pattern to make our own.
 

 
A new boiler top with chimney base fitted. Hole in the middle is the coal hole. It looks trivial but the boiler top was a weekend's work.
 

 
The feedheater box machined and ready for its cladding.
 

 
New lathes are shite. This is our middle lathe. I love Swifts. They are no Dean Smith and Grace but they're not bad at all.
 

 
So, what you have seen is a tiny snippet of six months' of effort. What you may have noticed is no mention of an engine. This was something that had been exercising us since the start. Building everything else was not that big a deal but making an engine from scratch was going to be a big ask for reasons that will become obvious. We also needed an engine to give us a waggon number an a proper registration.
 
Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode which can wait until tomorrow.
 
 
 
 

One of the things that made the decision to build another Super easy was that we had a boiler lying around. We designed and built the boiler for the first one, then built a new one for the S Type and then built another three of them. However, for reasons that don't need to be gone into we didn't sell the last one and kept it back. Here is the the last one we built sitting in a support frame. A pressure vessel designed, constructed and documented to the Pressure Equipment Directive. This is not your usual try to claim that it is a repair effort and the design dossier is what might be called extensive.
 
The grates are at the bottom and you drop coal down the top. It is a water tube design which is a copy of Sentinel's own design. It is what is referred to as a spiral pattern firebox. See below.
 

 
Here is a firebox that we made for the S Type prior to the tubes being welded into the firebox. The are sixty 1" OD tubes. This is double the number that Sentinel used. The problem of this design is that machining the tube holes is a little tricky because they pierce the firebox at a crazy angle.
 

 
The pattern the tubes make is rather hypnotic. The reason for this layout is that it gives a high heating area but it lets you have a hole in the middle. This is very important because that is what the coal falls through.
 

 
 
What we also had lying around was a new superheater which was meant to go with the boiler. The superheater sits inside the combustion space and heats the steam to above saturation temperature. Higher temperature = higher efficiency. Note 944 being ignored.
 

 
So that is what we started with. A new boiler and a new superheater that were lying round doing nothing.

At close to the turn of the last century the Glasgow firm of Alley and Maclennan moved to Shrewsbury and changed their name to Sentinel. They developed a steam cart that became known as the Standard and because it was so much better than most of what had gone before they sold a shed load of them and made a lot of money. However, by the early 1920s the Standard was old hat and had a number of design issues (trival matters like no brakes to speak of were becoming more important as roads got busier and loads got heavier). Sentinel put their thinking caps on to design something new and then went bust. The company was kicked back into life with a name that was only slightly different put their thinking caps back on and came up with the next model. It had features that were super. Its engine was super, the cab was super and it even had a foot brake which were super. There could only be one name for a waggon (two Gs because Sentinel couldn't spell either) that was this super and that is what we are discussing here. 
 
The Super deserved its name because despite a number of odd design features it was pretty much the sweet spot. A decent cab and brakes but without the problems of the later models.  I've posted this one a couple of times already but I can't be bothered uploading another example of a Super - they all look about the same. This is a Super Sentinel with a coke body on it.
 

 
For the uninitiated the general idea is the boiler sits right at the front in the cab and is fired from the top. The bunker is in the cab too. You then have the twin cylinder engine slung under the chassis with a chain driving each rear wheel. Steam waggons are bad for all sorts of reasons which is why lorries have pretty much always run on diesel. They do have a few advantages. They are quiet, they produce more torque than you have heard of and they don't have gears. Open the throttle and go. They are a joy to drive on the road. Particularly in traffic.
 
And here's the one we built back in the early 1990s. What I mean by "built" should become apparent as we go on.
 

 
You will note a few key differences. This one has windscreens. This was a period option and are essential. It also has pnematics rather than solids. Many waggons were returned to the factory to be converted from solids to pneumatics which allowed them to run at a legal maximum of 20mph instead of 12mph. We drive our waggons on the road so solids are a non-starter. You will also see that this one is very short. Some were cut down to drawbar tractors in period, however, in our case the shortness of the wheelbase was forced on us because where it lived at the time we couldn't get anything longer into the shed.
 
It was finished in 1995 and we did about 3500 miles in it - the above photo was taken about 130 miles from home. We got bored of it in 2000 and sold it to a chap who did about 12,000 miles in it. The old girl is living down south somewhere now. We moved onto the restoration of the later S Type Sentinel (photo elsewhere) and a couple of years ago we decided that we would build another Super because they are bestest.
 
This time round we will build it longer because the ultra short wheelbase of the last one wasn't brilliant on the road. Think SWB Series III Land Rover with tired springs and you'll know where I am coming from. So what we are aiming for this time round is something with the wheelbase and body of the Charringtons one up there with the windscreens and pneumatics of the one below it. Oh, and steam brakes and electric lights which are all period options/factory modifications.
 
There is a bit to catch up on so it will take a few posts. If it gets too dull let me know and I will stop.
 
Oh, and I am crap at taking pictures.

So where are we? By this point the list looked a bit like:
 
Boiler
Superheater
Chimney base
Injector
Most of the steering box
A steering wheel
Windscreen hinges
Ash pan
Tank filter boxes
Feed heater box and lid
A vague idea what we are up to
 
When we built the last one we started with an engine and then fretted about making axles and boilers and the rest of it. Now we were pretty happy that the rest of it could be built but the engine was going to be a problem. What Sentinel built was a fairly standard twin cylnder, double acting engine with poppet valves operated from camshafts (we'll come to them later). Where things got odd is that the Super has a twin chain drive. There is a sprocket on both ends of the crankshaft driving a chain to a sprocket on each rear wheel.
 
Errr, where are we going to put the differential?
 
After much head scratching they come up with one of the more mental ideas in vehicle design. We'll put it in the crankshaft. And in a stroke they made what would have been a difficult job of making an engine very much harder. So there was humming and hawing and then as is usually the case if you think about a problem for long enough someone solves it for you. The widow of John Keeley died and there was a big auction of all the stuff he had amassed over his life. One of the lots was the remains of a sorry looking Super engine minus lots of bits. Fortunately there was a crankcase and - most importantly - a crankshaft. The old man trooped down there with the intention of buying it come what may. A coupe of weeks later we had to do an 850 mile round trip in the LDV to pick it up. Here it is, upside down, on a pallet. The big bits that are missing are the cylinders, the camshafts, all of the valve gear and the water pump. Still, we stand a chance of getting a waggon number if we can identify it.
 

 
Peering through the crankcase door you can glimpse the crankshaft. Pretty much everything you can see is buggered.
 

 
Hosed down and on the workshop floor things look a bit better.
 

 
So you take it to bits and have a look. This is the crankshaft stripped of all its shafts and gears.
 

 
To give some idea of scale those are 3.5 tonne axlestands it is sitting on. Two people can just lift the bare crank. One of the avenues we explored was having a crankshaft made by LCR (who are an amazing company who can do some well impressive stuff) because it is way beyond our workshop capability. The estimate from LCR was that to manufacture what you are looking at there less the balance weights would be £14,000 plus yer dreaded, mate. When you saw what they were doing for the money we had no argument with the price. The problem was that it was £14K FFS. 
 
Just to jump forward a little so you can see what it is meant to look like this is the same crankshaft once we'd finished it. I'll fill in how it got to be like this but it should give an idea of how it works. The large lumps of metal on each end of the crank are the partially machined sprocket carriers. These spin freely on the crankshaft and are driven by shafts that pass the the hollow journals. It is unbelieveably heavy by this point. You see the massive main bearings? It needs them.
 

 
However, jump back to a close up on a couple of the diff gears. You can probably see that they are buggered.So the crank needed all new bushes (8 off), new drive shafts (2 off), new master gears (2 off) new diff pinions (2 off) and new diff gears (2 off). On top of that it needed to have the big end journals reground which we can't do so it had to go to the engine remanufacturers to be reground and that took a while for it to come back.
 

 
So from this exercise we have a very long list of things that need to be made/found to turn this into a working engine. However, work carries on other things. The steering box, cover, top bearing housing  and crank are were all done so now it needed the shaft and nut made. This is a left handed, two start ACME thread at 1" pitch which is a bit of a tall order to machine. Its a good thing the old man has had a bit of practce making these now so that wasn't too bad (for me - it took him several days). You need to cut a square thread first then go in with an ACME form tool so you need to kep your wits about you. These days threads like this would be rolled (and beautiful they would be too) but this is an oddball one so you would need to spring for the cost of the dies which is a no no.
 

 
Meh, not bad I suppose...
 

 
And this is the start of the front axle. The bend in the middle is so it goes around the boiler. Originally these were forged but we don't have a massive hammer so the approach we have taken was to make a pattern and have them cast in steel. Then we simply* weld them together in the middle. This also solves the problem of machining the axle since the whiole axle won't fit in our boring machine.
 

 
This is an extract from the parts book. Gives you a bit of an idea what the front axle beam is meant to look like.
 

 
And some long lengths of channel were delivered. You will be a chassis one day soon.
 

 
That will do for now. In the next thrilling installment some things are cast and other things are machined.

So where do you start? The same place as last time. Get the spare parts book and start scoring things off.
 

This is the page for the rear axle. All you need is one (or two) of everything and you are home and dry. The well of spare parts is pretty much dry so you are on your own. Almost everything will need to be made. Fortunately one bit which would be very difficult to make is the injector. Through dumb luck we managed to get one.
 

 
The injector uses steam at boiler pressure to force water into the boiler (I have no idea how). Normally the engine driven water pump does that but if you are stationary then you need an injector. How injectors work is pretty much a black art as far as I can see. The other bits in the picture are the raw castings for the windscreen hinges.
 

 
Exciting, huh? These are two raw castings for the water tank filter boxes. Each one will soak up many hours' of machine time. Another part we got early was a chimney base. The exhaust from the engine exits up the chimney to provide induced draft on the fire. Don't worry, there will be some recognisable bits along soonish.
 

 
Also quite early we managed to get a casting for a steering box. Here is the box in the boring machine.
 

 
The throttle valve partially machined and bolted to the boiler shell.
 

 
A boiler non return valve in its raw state.
 

 
And this is another part of the throttle valve. It's called the dump valve and it makes a "Phsssssttttt" noise when you use it. The idea is that because the throttle opens and closes by hand you have a foot pedal which dumps the steam straight up the chimney away from the engine. This is handy for moving around slowly but also it is your OMG emergency brake. According to the operator's manual when things are grim you step on the dump valve, drag the engine into reverse and let go of the dump valve. The handbok describes this as "To stop almost instantaneously at risk of snashing the engine".
 

 
This is the feed heater. The exhaust steam passes through this box as the boiler feedwater is fed through a coil inside. This improves efficiency.
 

 
Things start to look a little more finished than others. Here is the crank arm for the steering box.
 

 
And here is a more finished steering box and cover.
 

 
Front and rear towing eyes. Some nice chap had a pattern made for one and we cadged the pattern to make our own.
 

 
A new boiler top with chimney base fitted. Hole in the middle is the coal hole. It looks trivial but the boiler top was a weekend's work.
 

 
The feedheater box machined and ready for its cladding.
 

 
New lathes are shite. This is our middle lathe. I love Swifts. They are no Dean Smith and Grace but they're not bad at all.
 

 
So, what you have seen is a tiny snippet of six months' of effort. What you may have noticed is no mention of an engine. This was something that had been exercising us since the start. Building everything else was not that big a deal but making an engine from scratch was going to be a big ask for reasons that will become obvious. We also needed an engine to give us a waggon number an a proper registration.
 
Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode which can wait until tomorrow.
 
 
 
 

There is a load of stuff to do today and a rapidly looming deadline so let's have an update. That will put food on the table.
 
So the chassis is bolted together, the holes reamed and the rivets in the bag. Now all we need to do is heat them up, pop them in and job done but first you need a rivet gun. This is a McDonald gun made in Glasgow and these things have built a lot of ships. This was last used when we put a new tube sheet of the Fowler roller back in 1985 when we had two ex-riveters to help us out (YCRTA two ex-riveters to actually do the difficult bit) but now we were on our own.
 

 
There were five of us this time. Someone on the gun, one with the hydraulic holder, one on the pump, one heating rivets and one running with the white hot rivet. I got to play at being a manly proper man and work the gun. I got to do that because of my in depth knowledge and understanding of rivetted joints. Ha ha ha. We only had to put 30 5/8" rivets in. We all had the impression of long departed riveting gangs looking down on us from above pissing themselves laughing at our pitiful efforts. After a bit of arsing around I reckon we got there.
 

 
This is the front one. That keeps some bolts in it because it needs to be removed to get the boiler out.
 

 
It is hot, bloody noisy and not exactly easy work. It is no wonder that people who did this for a living were worked to death by their forties.
 
With the frame bashed together the next bit is the footplate which is made in two halves so you can get the boiler out. If you look back you'll see a picture of a pile of bits of plate. The footplate is made of admiralty pattern chequer plate which has diamonds rolled into it which hasn't been available for a long tie now so you have to take what you can get. We were very lucky to get a load out of an old mill and then we spent an irritating Saturday playing jigsaws with tape measures and french chalk trying to work out the best way of joining the plates in a way that minimised the number of joins and hid them as far as possible. After a full a frank exchange on views on the subject of how to do it we came up with something that made the best of a bad job.
 
Then it needs tacked together, turned over and marked out as per the drawing. There are a few curves that take a while to get right. Also, because you only have one go at this you do get a bit checky. Once you are happy, cebtre dab all the cut lines and break out the NM250 oxy-propane cutting torch and off you go. Then you lay into it with big angle grinders and you end up with something with lines and curves all over the place.
 
In the picture below you can see two short join lines on the front plate  - these will be hidden by the boiler. You should be able to make out the join down the middle of the rear plate. This is annoying but hey ho. The join that runs from side to side across the hole is meant to be there. That gets bolted up.
 
Note how the lines of the front plate match the lines of the rear plate. It took a lot of cutting and grinding to make that happen. This is the somewhere near finished plate lifted up into position on the chassis. The cut on the hole looks scruffy because it hasn't been tidied up yet - we are working close to the S4 and we are waiting for a couple of welding screens to arrive to keep the sparks off the finished one.
 
This is an important bit because that set of curves across the front kind of define a Super Sentinel.
 

 
The big hole is what the boiler sits in. As you have probably worked out by now the boiler does tend to dominate the cab. And makes it very hot in there.
 

 
The axle beam waiting for the jig to be finished.
 

 
Fairly stout weld needed to hold it together.
 

 
A somewhere near finished steering box bell  crank. The big straight arm hangs down and connects to the drag link.
 

 
The start of the track rod ends. These have bronze spherical seats which provide movement. There is a fair bit of machining left to do on these to make them look convincing.
 

 
The bronze seats have small springs behind them to keep enough load on things to keep them together. These are those small springs. This is very cack handed engineering. Nice springs, though.
 

 
 
One for the woodworkers in the audience. I found this photo of the spring hanger and slipper plates. A dovetail joint in half inch steel plate.
 

 
Drive sprockets on the carriers. This is the rear face of them. The bronze rings are a modification. When these were made the used a super crude mechanical seal on the main bearing housing which wouldn't hold small coal so we ditched them and went for a design of modern lip seal like an oil seal on a car hub. Once the carriers are on no one will see any difference. The little sprocket you see fixed to the one on the left is the drive sprocket for the dynamo. The original set up was appalling and because we tend to drive at night a lot we need something that works. This layout allows us to run a much bigger sprocket and get more speed out of the dynamo without it looking awful. Once the carrier is on the drive chain should hide almost everything.
 

 
Steam engines need a lot of oil both in the crankcase and the top end. This is the start of the mechanical lubricator that pumps something that looks like treacle into the steam supply to keep the cyliders oiled. It is driven by the engine.
 

 
A pile of boiler bits. These are the hinges that take the grates and the ash pan. They look like crude bits of tat because they are crude bits of tat.
 

 
And this finally arrived from Aus. This is the body for the valve that controls the boiler feed pump. The water pump runs all the time that the engine is running so when you don't want water in the boiler you have a bypass  - sorry, in old speak - bye-pass valve that sends the flow back to the water tank. This is worked from a lever in the cab. This is a right fiddly thingwith internal ports and it had to be cast. Making a pattern for this was waaaaay beyond what we could do so we had someone quote to make one for us. Let us just say that we were glad that a nice man in Aus had already had a pattern made and got us one cast at the same time. This was very, very much cheaper. There is a lot of machining to make this thing into a finished item.
 

 
It the background you will see a shiny thing with a sphere on the end. This is the start of the other bit of the track rod ends.
 
Next jobs:
Carry on with front axle
Get some stock bar to start building up the front of the cab
Work out what wood is needs to make a start on the cab
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The tale of Mr and Mrs Docker is entertaining. Good enough place to start is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_Daimlers
 
If they were to have appeared on Mr and Mrs with Derek Batey I reckon they would have won the £15 jackpot.
 
So Bernard, Norah can't hear you - she's in the soundproof booth. Don't be nervous. So Bernard, you need to buy a present for Norah. What do you think she would like most? Would she like flowers - all ladies like flowers don't they? Would she like chocolates or would she like to be made director of a coachbuilding firm that you have bullied the board of directors into purchasing so she is able to spend an almost insane sum of money creating some of the most gauche vehicles ever built in the UK then turn up to the motor show wearing a coat paid for by your company which cost the equivalent of several assembly line workers' houses?

If any one is interested in other stuff we've done and simply cannot wait for the next exciting update take a look here: http://hmvf.co.uk/topic/8226-another-pioneer/
 
It's the log of the restoration of a 1945 Scammell Pioneer we did a while back. I managed to keep this record pretty complete except for towards the end where it should become clear why there was a bit of a jump.

There is a load of stuff to do today and a rapidly looming deadline so let's have an update. That will put food on the table.
 
So the chassis is bolted together, the holes reamed and the rivets in the bag. Now all we need to do is heat them up, pop them in and job done but first you need a rivet gun. This is a McDonald gun made in Glasgow and these things have built a lot of ships. This was last used when we put a new tube sheet of the Fowler roller back in 1985 when we had two ex-riveters to help us out (YCRTA two ex-riveters to actually do the difficult bit) but now we were on our own.
 

 
There were five of us this time. Someone on the gun, one with the hydraulic holder, one on the pump, one heating rivets and one running with the white hot rivet. I got to play at being a manly proper man and work the gun. I got to do that because of my in depth knowledge and understanding of rivetted joints. Ha ha ha. We only had to put 30 5/8" rivets in. We all had the impression of long departed riveting gangs looking down on us from above pissing themselves laughing at our pitiful efforts. After a bit of arsing around I reckon we got there.
 

 
This is the front one. That keeps some bolts in it because it needs to be removed to get the boiler out.
 

 
It is hot, bloody noisy and not exactly easy work. It is no wonder that people who did this for a living were worked to death by their forties.
 
With the frame bashed together the next bit is the footplate which is made in two halves so you can get the boiler out. If you look back you'll see a picture of a pile of bits of plate. The footplate is made of admiralty pattern chequer plate which has diamonds rolled into it which hasn't been available for a long tie now so you have to take what you can get. We were very lucky to get a load out of an old mill and then we spent an irritating Saturday playing jigsaws with tape measures and french chalk trying to work out the best way of joining the plates in a way that minimised the number of joins and hid them as far as possible. After a full a frank exchange on views on the subject of how to do it we came up with something that made the best of a bad job.
 
Then it needs tacked together, turned over and marked out as per the drawing. There are a few curves that take a while to get right. Also, because you only have one go at this you do get a bit checky. Once you are happy, cebtre dab all the cut lines and break out the NM250 oxy-propane cutting torch and off you go. Then you lay into it with big angle grinders and you end up with something with lines and curves all over the place.
 
In the picture below you can see two short join lines on the front plate  - these will be hidden by the boiler. You should be able to make out the join down the middle of the rear plate. This is annoying but hey ho. The join that runs from side to side across the hole is meant to be there. That gets bolted up.
 
Note how the lines of the front plate match the lines of the rear plate. It took a lot of cutting and grinding to make that happen. This is the somewhere near finished plate lifted up into position on the chassis. The cut on the hole looks scruffy because it hasn't been tidied up yet - we are working close to the S4 and we are waiting for a couple of welding screens to arrive to keep the sparks off the finished one.
 
This is an important bit because that set of curves across the front kind of define a Super Sentinel.
 

 
The big hole is what the boiler sits in. As you have probably worked out by now the boiler does tend to dominate the cab. And makes it very hot in there.
 

 
The axle beam waiting for the jig to be finished.
 

 
Fairly stout weld needed to hold it together.
 

 
A somewhere near finished steering box bell  crank. The big straight arm hangs down and connects to the drag link.
 

 
The start of the track rod ends. These have bronze spherical seats which provide movement. There is a fair bit of machining left to do on these to make them look convincing.
 

 
The bronze seats have small springs behind them to keep enough load on things to keep them together. These are those small springs. This is very cack handed engineering. Nice springs, though.
 

 
 
One for the woodworkers in the audience. I found this photo of the spring hanger and slipper plates. A dovetail joint in half inch steel plate.
 

 
Drive sprockets on the carriers. This is the rear face of them. The bronze rings are a modification. When these were made the used a super crude mechanical seal on the main bearing housing which wouldn't hold small coal so we ditched them and went for a design of modern lip seal like an oil seal on a car hub. Once the carriers are on no one will see any difference. The little sprocket you see fixed to the one on the left is the drive sprocket for the dynamo. The original set up was appalling and because we tend to drive at night a lot we need something that works. This layout allows us to run a much bigger sprocket and get more speed out of the dynamo without it looking awful. Once the carrier is on the drive chain should hide almost everything.
 

 
Steam engines need a lot of oil both in the crankcase and the top end. This is the start of the mechanical lubricator that pumps something that looks like treacle into the steam supply to keep the cyliders oiled. It is driven by the engine.
 

 
A pile of boiler bits. These are the hinges that take the grates and the ash pan. They look like crude bits of tat because they are crude bits of tat.
 

 
And this finally arrived from Aus. This is the body for the valve that controls the boiler feed pump. The water pump runs all the time that the engine is running so when you don't want water in the boiler you have a bypass  - sorry, in old speak - bye-pass valve that sends the flow back to the water tank. This is worked from a lever in the cab. This is a right fiddly thingwith internal ports and it had to be cast. Making a pattern for this was waaaaay beyond what we could do so we had someone quote to make one for us. Let us just say that we were glad that a nice man in Aus had already had a pattern made and got us one cast at the same time. This was very, very much cheaper. There is a lot of machining to make this thing into a finished item.
 

 
It the background you will see a shiny thing with a sphere on the end. This is the start of the other bit of the track rod ends.
 
Next jobs:
Carry on with front axle
Get some stock bar to start building up the front of the cab
Work out what wood is needs to make a start on the cab
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Oh joy. Another update. You see that thing that looks a bit like a cylinder all covered in old cladding and asbestos? No hope for that but it will live again as a pattern. A bit of a cheat I am afraid but we only need to make two of them. The foundry hated us for this.
 

 
And slightly less cheating, this is the pattern for the water pump con rods. Water pumps in steamers are expected to do a bit more work than in your Acclaim so they are a bit more butch.
 

 
One of the things we were struggling with was that there was a bit of a hole in the lathe capability. The shafts for the diff were all made in EN24 which seems to need fairly high cutting speeds. The Swift couldn't spin that fast and the Colchester Student wasn't big enough. The problem is that people are only just discovering that the amazing Bristol Churchill Imperial lathe buit in Qingdao for three and six wasn't quite the amazing bargain they thought it was so half way decent lathes are getting expensive again. Most dealers want £5-7K for a Colchester Triumph these days depening on spec. We managed to fine this one for a fraction of that. Mainly because it had very little kit with it and there had been a rather shoddy repair to the clutch and input shaft.
 

 
This is it in the process of being taken to bits. Once it is done we will be able to spin things quite fast. I'm not a massive fan of Colchester lathes but go and take a look at what a Dean Smith and Grace or Lang will set you back and you'll see why we'll just have to live with it. In the end it needed only a set of guide rollers for the clutch bought for it. We were able to make everything else. This was good because Colchester spares are terrifyingly expensive. A tiny padded envelope arrives with three tiny rollers in it. Doesn't seem a very fair swap for the four hundred notes you handed over for them.
 
Various manifolds cleaned up and waiting for their new valves. Also in that pile are some crankcase breathers a pair of cam gear covers and a pair of gland followers for the water pump.
 

 
This is what came back from the foundry. Some vaguely cylinder shaped lumps of cast iron. These will need a lot of machining to turn them into something that actually works. Lots of things that if we were doing it properly would be cored so things like ports would already be there. However, we will have to rely on man hours to machine them instead. You see that mutant lump of cast iron sitting next to a cylinder? That is one of the three balance weights from the crankshaft. Lump of brass lower right is another project. I'll show you that later.
 

 
Some more bits back from the foundry. New cylinder heads and a water pump con rod. Also visible are a pair of finished drive shafts and a piston.
 

 
 
Eventually the crankshaft came back from the grinders. We can do a lot of things but crank grinding is not one of them. Now the work of rebuilding it can begin. You see the bronze bushes? They are all buggered and need replaced. Note the finished quality of the crankshaft forging. This is why I get annoyed when people tell me, "They don't build them like they used to, eh?". No, we build them properly now.
 

 

 
Another important bit. A casting for the water pump. It also came with a ram but it is worn and too small so we'll need a new one of them. This Super is being built with a high volume water pump 'cos that will mean we can go faster for longer (go faster = need more steam = need more water).
 

 
Spot the difference? The bushes have gone. A trivial change but took a while to do. Bushes are usually made with an interference fit so you shrink them in liquid nitrogen or heat the thing into which they are fitting. Then when things return to the normal temperature everything stays put. However, getting them back out is a bit of a bugger. The usual approach is to pop the thing in the lathe/boring machine and machine them off center until the bush collapses. A bit tricky in this case so we opted to cut them very carefully by hand. See the yellow macine hacksaw blade on the floor? Took a while but we got there.
 

 
And this is some of what came out. The big ones are the main bearings. They were machined off centre. Now we jus need to make one of everything and it can all go back together.
 

 
Another bit. This is the foot valve for the steam brake. Steam brakes are awesome - beautiful controllable linear things that ooze feel.
 

 
Woo yay! Finished things. These came back from Leek Gears. Teeth are all flame harded. A very pleasing sight and no mistake.
 

 

 
You know how when you go to some seaside town there are horse and carriages clip clopping up and down the front? These days people seem to get all arsey about horse cack all over the place so there is usually some sort of turd catch tray at the back end of Dobbin. This is the same sort of idea. This is the ash pan. Catches the ashes as they fall through the grate. Actaully it was more about controlling draught on the fire rather than keeping the front at Skeg tidy.
 

 
There was now a lot of machining to do. Here is a nearlyfinished big end being fitted to the crank journal. You do an lot of work to make things fit. This is why fitters are called fitters. Lego man appears in the next few photos because someone somewhere else whined that there was no idea of scale. The sharp eyed will notice that the bolts are too short. This is because we are using the old bolts here. New ones are being made elsewhere in the workshop.
 

 
And this is the first dry fit of the crankcase and trunk guides. A lot of measuring needs to go on to get the cylinders right. Measure nine times, get someone else to measure another dozen times, give it one final check, then measure twice more for luck, cut once. There are a lot of things need to be in the right place. Front axle C bracket just sitting there for some reason.
 

 
The other big end being machined.
 

 
A nice oh it might be finished one day bit. A pair of reproduction waggon plates. Lists all of the patents the waggon was built under. An act of supreme corporate arrogance because no one was going to copy them. Ever. Sentinel would have been better off trying to patent a Gardner LW engine.
 

 
Bottle for the water pump. This smooths out the flow. A bit. Promise.
 

 
And finally the spring slippers being machined in the shaper. Shapers are very under rated machines. You can do a lot with them.
 

 
Looking forward in the photostream next time things start to look even more finished and the crankshaft ends up looking like it did in that photo I put up earlier.
 
 

If any one is interested in other stuff we've done and simply cannot wait for the next exciting update take a look here: http://hmvf.co.uk/topic/8226-another-pioneer/
 
It's the log of the restoration of a 1945 Scammell Pioneer we did a while back. I managed to keep this record pretty complete except for towards the end where it should become clear why there was a bit of a jump.

There is a load of stuff to do today and a rapidly looming deadline so let's have an update. That will put food on the table.
 
So the chassis is bolted together, the holes reamed and the rivets in the bag. Now all we need to do is heat them up, pop them in and job done but first you need a rivet gun. This is a McDonald gun made in Glasgow and these things have built a lot of ships. This was last used when we put a new tube sheet of the Fowler roller back in 1985 when we had two ex-riveters to help us out (YCRTA two ex-riveters to actually do the difficult bit) but now we were on our own.
 

 
There were five of us this time. Someone on the gun, one with the hydraulic holder, one on the pump, one heating rivets and one running with the white hot rivet. I got to play at being a manly proper man and work the gun. I got to do that because of my in depth knowledge and understanding of rivetted joints. Ha ha ha. We only had to put 30 5/8" rivets in. We all had the impression of long departed riveting gangs looking down on us from above pissing themselves laughing at our pitiful efforts. After a bit of arsing around I reckon we got there.
 

 
This is the front one. That keeps some bolts in it because it needs to be removed to get the boiler out.
 

 
It is hot, bloody noisy and not exactly easy work. It is no wonder that people who did this for a living were worked to death by their forties.
 
With the frame bashed together the next bit is the footplate which is made in two halves so you can get the boiler out. If you look back you'll see a picture of a pile of bits of plate. The footplate is made of admiralty pattern chequer plate which has diamonds rolled into it which hasn't been available for a long tie now so you have to take what you can get. We were very lucky to get a load out of an old mill and then we spent an irritating Saturday playing jigsaws with tape measures and french chalk trying to work out the best way of joining the plates in a way that minimised the number of joins and hid them as far as possible. After a full a frank exchange on views on the subject of how to do it we came up with something that made the best of a bad job.
 
Then it needs tacked together, turned over and marked out as per the drawing. There are a few curves that take a while to get right. Also, because you only have one go at this you do get a bit checky. Once you are happy, cebtre dab all the cut lines and break out the NM250 oxy-propane cutting torch and off you go. Then you lay into it with big angle grinders and you end up with something with lines and curves all over the place.
 
In the picture below you can see two short join lines on the front plate  - these will be hidden by the boiler. You should be able to make out the join down the middle of the rear plate. This is annoying but hey ho. The join that runs from side to side across the hole is meant to be there. That gets bolted up.
 
Note how the lines of the front plate match the lines of the rear plate. It took a lot of cutting and grinding to make that happen. This is the somewhere near finished plate lifted up into position on the chassis. The cut on the hole looks scruffy because it hasn't been tidied up yet - we are working close to the S4 and we are waiting for a couple of welding screens to arrive to keep the sparks off the finished one.
 
This is an important bit because that set of curves across the front kind of define a Super Sentinel.
 

 
The big hole is what the boiler sits in. As you have probably worked out by now the boiler does tend to dominate the cab. And makes it very hot in there.
 

 
The axle beam waiting for the jig to be finished.
 

 
Fairly stout weld needed to hold it together.
 

 
A somewhere near finished steering box bell  crank. The big straight arm hangs down and connects to the drag link.
 

 
The start of the track rod ends. These have bronze spherical seats which provide movement. There is a fair bit of machining left to do on these to make them look convincing.
 

 
The bronze seats have small springs behind them to keep enough load on things to keep them together. These are those small springs. This is very cack handed engineering. Nice springs, though.
 

 
 
One for the woodworkers in the audience. I found this photo of the spring hanger and slipper plates. A dovetail joint in half inch steel plate.
 

 
Drive sprockets on the carriers. This is the rear face of them. The bronze rings are a modification. When these were made the used a super crude mechanical seal on the main bearing housing which wouldn't hold small coal so we ditched them and went for a design of modern lip seal like an oil seal on a car hub. Once the carriers are on no one will see any difference. The little sprocket you see fixed to the one on the left is the drive sprocket for the dynamo. The original set up was appalling and because we tend to drive at night a lot we need something that works. This layout allows us to run a much bigger sprocket and get more speed out of the dynamo without it looking awful. Once the carrier is on the drive chain should hide almost everything.
 

 
Steam engines need a lot of oil both in the crankcase and the top end. This is the start of the mechanical lubricator that pumps something that looks like treacle into the steam supply to keep the cyliders oiled. It is driven by the engine.
 

 
A pile of boiler bits. These are the hinges that take the grates and the ash pan. They look like crude bits of tat because they are crude bits of tat.
 

 
And this finally arrived from Aus. This is the body for the valve that controls the boiler feed pump. The water pump runs all the time that the engine is running so when you don't want water in the boiler you have a bypass  - sorry, in old speak - bye-pass valve that sends the flow back to the water tank. This is worked from a lever in the cab. This is a right fiddly thingwith internal ports and it had to be cast. Making a pattern for this was waaaaay beyond what we could do so we had someone quote to make one for us. Let us just say that we were glad that a nice man in Aus had already had a pattern made and got us one cast at the same time. This was very, very much cheaper. There is a lot of machining to make this thing into a finished item.
 

 
It the background you will see a shiny thing with a sphere on the end. This is the start of the other bit of the track rod ends.
 
Next jobs:
Carry on with front axle
Get some stock bar to start building up the front of the cab
Work out what wood is needs to make a start on the cab
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Aye, leave them be.
 
They suffer enough as it is.

I've never had a telly licence so the last time I watched TG it was being presented by William Woolard. Tonight on Top Gear we'll be looking at the Tipo, the new Golf challenger from Fiat, Tony Mason will be wobbling his head and grinning while talking about a fatal rallying accident and Sue Cook will be looking into the problem of parking in Telford but we start this week with news of a revolution in electric cars...
 
Those with a longish memory might remember the arts programme strand Without Walls on C4. They ran four programmes in that slot called Auto Erotic which had people like Russell Bulgin being rude about off roaders. That's always stuck in my head and I have long daydreamed about a series of Top Gear presented by Jonathan Meades and Will Self for years. I'd definitely pay for a telly license to watch that.