Project It is just so Super (Sentinel).

[outlaw118]

Rusty old biscuit tin for sale, but very little help re colours (you're probably way ahead of me but I'm bored) I've put a message on the lost Glasgow page on FB, see if anyone knows anything.

[JimH]

16 hours ago, outlaw118 said:

 I've put a message on the lost Glasgow page on FB, see if anyone knows anything.
 

Thanks for that. You would have thought with a company so large that reckoned to bake half of Glasgow's bread someone would remember seeing their waggons/vans/carts around. That massive building on the tin is their factory which was pretty much in the middle of town so they were hardly hidden away yet no on seems to know anything at all. 

None of the biscuit tins that crop up from time to time give any clues about liveries and the lengthy history of the USBC which was written just after WW1 gives any clues as to what colour their lorries were painted. The Mitchell Library holds the USBC archives but I suspect that this will be full of dust dry accounts and minutes of board meetings.

[JimH]

This doesn't look very different to the last picture in the last post except the dark grey primer is now light grey primer. However, in between the picture up there and this one there has been a lot of work. The ash bend was carefully tidied up, the D beadings around the doors/cut outs fitted and finished and the sides flatted down. By flatted down I don't mean wafted over with a bit of P120. It took a long time to sand the boards so the whole side was as flat as my talents could manage. That meant removing all of the dark grey primer which jolly well should not have been there in the first place ho hum.

 

 

Levers in shiny paint...

Period looking valve handles applied to non-period valves...

And a top damper made for the chimney. Chimney top casting still looks shocking because No1 apprentice has only just started on it. The chimney cap is supposed to be a pressed steel thing painted black but we haven't managed to get one of those yet so we are having to make do with this rather poor casting. I have a passionate loathing of polished brass chimney caps so this will be painted black anyway.

And a lever for the top damper made to look something like it should. This flap just swings over the chimney to keep the boiler a bit warmer overnight.

I need 128 angled brackets to build the body. This is the sort of soul destroying job that is given to an apprentice. Fortunately we have some of them to do that sort of work now. 28 down, 100 to go.

It is good practice for No1 apprentice to learn to gas weld. Annoyingly she has much steadier hands than me so despite just starting she is already pretty good.I know this weld is probably the easiest one there is but the steel is quite light and bracket quite fiddly. Anyway, the most important hurdle to get over is being shit scared of the burny hot flame.

The water tank has been blasted, caulked, treated and bolted up for a pressure test which it passed to my amazement. I need to spend some time on it sorting out the fold marks and tidying up the ends.

This is the colour of the interior. I need this bit painted so I can avoid removing the levers again to paint the rest of the interior.

A back end looking a bit black. About the only thing left to do to stop it moving under its own power is the brake levers and the temporary water tank to rig up.

I lashed out some money on a new one of these. Nice, isn't it?

We jump on a wee bit and here are the brake levers buttoned up in place. Once it was all hammered up we put the bucket pump on the brake cylinder and pumped it up to 1.5 times what it could reasonably be expected to see. Nothing leaked, squeeked, creaked or broke so that's good. We now have fully functioning brakes. There are some springs to get to take any rattles out of the levers but they aren't here yet.

Being at a loose end this weekend I started final fitting the doors. They weren't too far off last time but there was still a bit to go with them.

And I finished off the wee bit at the top of the passenger door cut out.

The off side door was an easier fit (no the bolts haven't been cut down yet) but you do get a good idea of how roomy the cab is and how easy it is to access. You really don' want t bail out of this in an emergency situation. Steering wheel isn't on because I'm currently coxcombing it. Ooh. Err. Missus.

From the front you see that you have to lace your legs around a few hard and/or hot things. The four posts sticking up support the footplate which isn't in at the moment. The footplate is a slightly non standard thing that lifts your feet up so they can reach the brake valve.

Throttle valve in place but not piped up because the insurance inspector is arriving soon to do the cold exam. Then it gets reassembled to do the hot test and then it all gets stripped down again so the cladding can be fitted. However, before it gets stripped down again we'll be able to test a few things to make sure everything works as intended.  We also need to make a heat shield for the throttle valve because it is right next to your knee and it gets very hot indeed.

This is good. This is the start of the door latch. It is a bit of 1" D beading with a 90 degree bend in it. Once it is finished it won't look much less crude than this. The idea is that it bolts to the inside of the cab side and swings over to hold the door closed. They did phone this one in. 

This is the chimney you saw further up the page somewhere near done. Now it can be painted with VHT paint as an assembly. The cap has had a lot of work sunk into it by No1 apprentice with files and a die grinder and it is now looking pretty close to the shape it should be. The damper boss was a bit of a mess to it had to be built up with Belzona to make it look a wee bit less rubbish.

Things like the chimneys never get much thought but this one has soaked up a lot of manhours.

One thing which was done that has taken forever but I have no photos to show is that the superheater is now fitted to the chimney base. It was then all dismantled for inspection so things don't look much different other than a few more holes in the chimney base. What it does mean is that as soon as th cold exam is done we can get some heat on the boiler.

I've also just go an email from the wood yards to say that the wood for the rear body is ready which means that once we've collected it we'll be able to start constructing that. Oh joy.

 

 

[Dick Cheeseburger]

I've not commented on this thread for ages, but have quietly followed with interest. Amazing work and so heart-warming that we still have enough engineering capability and ingenuity remaining here to pull off projects on this scale. That, and people crazy enough to start such enormous challenges in the first place! 

Awe-inspiring. 

[Crackers]

3 hours ago, JimH said:

This is the sort of soul destroying job that is given to an apprentice.

Shit the bed, where do I sign up for that?! I'd give my right arm to be doing my apprenticeship on that beautiful machine.

This is probably my favourite thread on this entire forum (sorry everyone else). It's the kind of engineering I want to be doing, not driving spreadsheets and accounting software all day.

 

[JimH]

18 hours ago, Dick Longbridge said:

Amazing work and so heart-warming that we still have enough engineering capability and ingenuity remaining here to pull off projects on this scale.

It is very nice of you to say that but what we are doing is not proper engineering. I keep going on about this but these waggons cost in the region of £250,000 in today's money and they were guaranteed for 28 days. Compared with a horse and cart they were super but compared with what we design today they are piles of useless scrap. One of my least favourite things people say to me is "they don't build them like this any more". No, no they don't. Now we build things that work for ever and don't cost very much at all. 

We do some pretty amazing engineering and design in this country which is many, many leagues ahead of what we are playing about with here. The problem is that proper engineering is really dull, involves staring at screens all day and is generally the sort of thing you want to do for money rather than entertainment.

 

[rml2345]

This is my favourite thread OV EVAR. Outstanding levels of craftsmanship and attention to detail here.

[JimH]

Quick update on a few things. Firstly a sizeable chunk of oak. There are 8 of these in total acting as bearers for the load deck.

Like I said, they are quite butch. All of the oak came from Venables Bros near Market Drayton. Their customer service may be a little on the functional side but you cannot fault their wood. Every bit of oak we have got from them has been absolutely spot on.

However, that is just one bit. The finished van body is going to be 2 feet higher than the cab roof so we're going to need quite a lot of wood. This is pretty much everything that is needed with the exception of 26 sheets of marine ply of varying thicknesses. Yelp.

This is the oak for the bearers, the side rails and the rear doors (which are full height so quite tall).

And this is the pile of ash for the uprights and roof beams (9 ash beams to steam bend)  together with T&G tulipwood for the roof and some more tulipwood to make the bunker which will go in the van body rather than the cab. This lot came from Illingworth in Manchester who are pretty helpful spuds but Venables were way cheaper for the oak. 

So, a bit to be going on with there then.

Over the past few nights I have been coxcombing the steering wheel. I'm bit of a sucker for this look and think it needs popularising in the same way that beaded seat covers were popular once. This is it part way through being soaked in boiled linseed oil which is why it is two different colours. The string around the spokes are not brilliant because this one is cast so the base of the spokes are very wide and it was hard to get that looking right. As far as I can see if you are talented at this sort of thing there are all sorts of techniques you can use but I'm not talented so we'll have to live with this.

And now soaked in oil and left to dry for about three weeks. Apparently as the oil dries the string shrinks and pulls everything very tight and secure. I leave them in the middle of the floor because I'm paranoid about linseed oil. How can something so resistant to burning just catch fire for a laugh?

Fibre arts. Or something.

What else? Look closely and you will see the very high tech door latch.

And if you look inside the illusion is shattered. This isn't quite right because I spent a bit more time forming it to the right shape. If you do them exactly right then the doors tend to rattle and it drives me spare.

My camera wouldn't focus on it but the blurry thing at the back is the water pump bypass handle. Pull it up to turn it on, push it down to turn it off. Don't take your eyes off the water level because things get nasty if you get it wrong.

And this is the boiler being buttoned back up for its pressure test. The insuarance inspector was here this week for the cold exam so the next step is to put a squeeze on it so the insurers are happy it will hang together.

And while we were down south collecting wood we also picked this up. It is the front axle from a Ford Pop. It is not for the Sentinel but it is for what might become the next project.

And just to show that I shut up and listen to people who know better than me ( @Mr Pastry for example ) I also managed to get a Ford Y type wishbone which is also used on the same vehicle.

It is possible that the next project will be very much lighter than the current one.

[DeeJay]

Tow car or to pull the big bugger up the hills?

[JimH]

No. The thing sitting on my drawing board is teeny wee.

[Mr Pastry]

10 hours ago, JimH said:

And just to show that I shut up and listen to people who know better than me ( @Mr Pastry for example ) I also managed to get a Ford Y type wishbone which is also used on the same vehicle.

Can't quite see from the photo, but it looks as though you have found an axle with the correct style of steering arms - luck or judgement?

[JimH]

Sheer luck. I hadn't given them any thought at all.

 

So much to learn.

[Mr Pastry]

10 hours ago, JimH said:

So much to learn.

It will be a walk in the park compared with a Sentinel, but much the same thought process -  how did the original builders do it?

[somewhatfoolish]

Something that looks a bit like a lotus 11? Won't hairy string be a bit hard on the hands, or is piloting Sentinels strictly for Yorkie-eating heroes wearing leather gloves?

[JimH]

20 hours ago, somewhatfoolish said:

Something that looks a bit like a lotus 11? Won't hairy string be a bit hard on the hands, or is piloting Sentinels strictly for Yorkie-eating heroes wearing leather gloves?

As I mentioned before everything in the cab is hot. After 100 miles or so your eyes are bloodshot and the skin on your knee is blistered. After 12 hours in the heat off the chimney is starting to cause your face to blister. You don't get in the cab without a pair of gloves on because the risk of leaving some skin on something hot is just too great. 

As for the next project, hopefully it should look as close to an 11 as possible. It certainly won't be a cut down Beetle chassis with an MG Metro engine in it. 

[JimH]

On 5/29/2021 at 9:42 AM, Mr Pastry said:

It will be a walk in the park compared with a Sentinel, but much the same thought process -  how did the original builders do it?

The big, gaping hole in our experience is tin bashing the rather curvy body but the whole point is to get better at something else and if you can work in brand new metal rather than piecing some rotter back together so much the better.

To be honest it is the whole reverse engineering that floats my boat. Trying to work out what they did and why is a fun exercise. Seeing where they cut corners and made do with something because money was tight or they just plain got it wrong. You spend a lot of time trying to get into their heads. I'm going to guess the world of classic racing cars is as chock full of chancers and bullshitters as that of steam engines and the number of people happy to parrot unsubstantiated folk tales and downright fibs is about the same. It's nice to dig down a little to find at least a little bit of truth. 

[Mr Pastry]

24 minutes ago, JimH said:

To be honest it is the whole reverse engineering that floats my boat. Trying to work out what they did and why is a fun exercise.

That is what I like about it .  What mainly comes through to me is how hard they had to work without much of the equipment that we have.

 

27 minutes ago, JimH said:

I'm going to guess the world of classic racing cars is as chock full of chancers and bullshitters as that of steam engines and the number of people happy to parrot unsubstantiated folk tales and downright fibs is about the same

Probably a lot worse!

[somewhatfoolish]

Chapman was one of those chancers, just one of the more successful ones; if he hadn't dropped dead he may well have ended up in a similar pickle to DeLorean.

[JimH]

Chancers and bullshitters who get off their arse and do something are just fine with me. It's the talkers, parrots and keepers of the sacred records that test my patience. 

[Mr Pastry]

@JimHTalking of sacred records, have some engineering* drawings.

 

[808 Estate]

Fuck me! How epic is this. Top work Sir.

[Minimad5]

Blimey.

What a thread 😎

[JimH]

And here it is with the... bloody hell. Someone's nicked it.

Ah, there it is.

The pools of water underneath should be a clue as to why it has been dragged outside. Do you like the relief valve vent pipe that runs up the chimney? There are very few that are as right as that one and I am very pleased with it.

I think you can just about make out a heat haze at the top of the flue (it's only burning wood) but just to prove it. It is having the hot test done this week so we thought we had give it a quick check before the inspector turned up.

There you go. Nought to 200 psi in only five years. One of the big unknowns was whether the injector would work - they are a bit difficult to test off the boiler - but fortunately it worked well enough to get water in the boiler. A little more fiddling required to get it working spot on but it was moving in the right direction. (The injector, by the way, is some black magic device which takes steam at boiler pressure and uses it to force feed water into the boiler at slightly more than boiler pressure.)

When I say I was pleased with the R/V vent pipe I was until I stood in front of it square on and saw the brass band had pulled it slightly off. A tweak needed to make it sit properly but everything was red hot by then so it will have to wait until later. Most of the copper pipe you see will be insulated with a very rare asbestos substitute that looks exactly like asbestos. There is also no cladding on the boiler at the moment for insection so it is pretty much unbearable standing next to it let alone sit in the cab. One of the reasons I am pleased about this is it is very thin wall pipe which is a nightmare to bend without it collapsing.

I'll do some better pictures of what is going on with the body later but here is a large amount of oak held in place with lots of clamps. I could not get oak side rails the full length so had to make them in two pieces with a lap joint glued and beefed up with a metal backing plate. I know the coach bolts are too long, the right ones haven't arrived yet. Fortunately the body design means that the coachbolt heads are covered up by the plywood cladding.

R/V tested and set, brakes working and the fire out driven back inside the shed. You start to get a feel for how many very hot things there are to burn you on these things. The temperature is one of the main features of driving these things.

Things don't look very tidy with the cladding off. There is a shaped ring that hides the top flange bolts and doubles as a clamp for the chimney top. We are also going toinsulate the full boiler top on this one. Originally they weren't and that was handy for making excellent cheese toasties but you get a lot (in bold and double underlined) of heat off it so an inch of ceramic blanket should helpto cool things down. The two pairs of pipes poking out of the boiler top are the superheater tails. Output from the superheater is about 550F so plenty of tape needed on them.

More load deck - the plywood comes to the bottom of the oak side rails sothe coachbolts are all covered up. This is bit of a shame because almost none of the nice wood that wasn't exactly cheap is visible. The coachbolts in the rear bearer are visible which is why we used old looking bolts. With the metric coachbolts (whit ones cost a fortune now) we use square nuts and keep the exposed thread as short as possible so they look as right as they are going to look when you peer underneath. You can just about make out that the water tank is painted and fitted and it still doesn't leak so that is nice.

An obstable course to get in.

So after that the insurance inspector comes this week to witness the R/V being floated and then it all gets stripped down again to get the boiler cladding fitted. Bit depressing to do it all again but there you go. Once the cladding is on it all gets buttoned up again and the new apron plate gets made and the cheekplates finished and the windscreens made and the body gets finished and that'spretty much it. Only another year or so to go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[djim]

Incredible project and a great update as always! Best thread on AS!

[JimH]

So the inspector returned, watched the R/V float and then went away again so that was money well spent. Then it all got taken apart again. I need to get the fork lift out to lift the superheater out but that will get done this weekend. Now we have to make the boiler cladding which is easily the second worst job of the whole project (fitting the superheater being the worst).

Injector on the bench waiting to be stripped down to check a few things. The wheel for the shut off valve is red because it hasn't been blasted since we used it as a pattern to cast all the other valve wheels.

And the throttle valve being stripped down to lap the main valve seat in. It also needs a new spindle made for the steam brake supply valve because it turned out that someone didn't do it right the first time. Not me, I hasten to add. The brake foot valve in the corner of the shot also needs one of the plugs reseated. 

As an aside we trooped down to Lincolnshire a couple of weeks ago to pick up some odds and sods that someone was clearing out and in the pile was another injector. Slightly incomplete but nothing too tricky to replace. I suggested that it would be a good starting point for the next waggon but that idea didn't gain a lot of traction.

Some more of the odds and sods. There was also a couple of Cooper Stewart drum type speedos and the main reason we bought the pile was there was a nice 24" wheelrim which we needed because we were short of a spare (not in shot). The Coventry Climax FW was not included in the haul.

No1 apprentice has been busy making the body brackets. These need fettled to make them look right but they are getting there.

The idea is that the U shaped part bolts to the oak bearer and then sits in the cast cup which is bolted to the chassis rail. There is then a single 1/2"whit bolt that holds the two together through the bottom of the cup. Things are yet to be drilled.

Here is a slightly better picture of the water tank in place. The white lines you see are the canvas tapes which buffer between the straps and the tank. They will muddy up and darken down in time. I think this is a reasonable approximation of what a Super Sentinel water tank should look like.

So, the body. The design is taken from a Sentinel drawing dated 1929 for a van body. There is only one drawing and a lot of detail is omitted so we are also working from the standard drawings for the platform which was usually fitted to flatbeds and then trying to interpret along the way. The original design used a tailgate that was about 24" high with two doors above. The idea of needing to open a door and lower a tailgate to get in was going to cause too much gyp so we have opted for a pair of full height doors.

There are 8off 4x4 (ish) oak bearers which sit directly on the chassis rails. Four of the bearers are fixed in place with those U brackets and cups you see further up the page and the other four just float around. Here we see the 8 bearers roughtly in place. I need to finalise the spacing to balance between trying to fit them round the hard points and minimising waste on the decking boards.

There are then two 5x2 side rails which fix to the bearers with angle brackets. On the flatbeds the bearers were wasted down to about 2" wide where they meet the siderails but I think this was to keep the hole centres at the right pitch to double up as hinge fixing bolts if you specified hinged sides. As far as I can make out from the van body drawing they didn't waste the bearers down which is good because it would have been hard work doing that. The side rails are 4.88m long nd the oak people couldn't supply lengths that long so they needed to be done in two pieces with a bolted and glued lap joint. That's what you can see with the far too long coachbolts about half way down.

There needed to be some modifications made to the design because it was originally designed for waggons on solids. One of the differences is that solids did not stick out as far and had mudguards that sat inside the chassis rails. Pneumatics and matched wings don't do that so the siderails need cut away around the wing. I was quite pleased that I didn't make a howling balls up of this.

The slightly increased width of the wings also leads to a problem of body width. Originally the bodies were made the same width as the cab which meant when they were converted to pneumatics at the factory the rear wings were left sticking out from the body in a slightly daft way. Those built by the factory with pneumatics from the start had slightly wider bodies which looked less daft. We have opted to make the body wider. It leaves a step in the side between the cab and the body but we felt this looked less slly than the Carlos Fandango/ 924 Carrera GT look.  This photo should give you an idea of how far the wings would have stuck out if we had used the original body width. The coachbolt heads are pocketed because the plymax linings are fitted over the bearers and side rails.

The rear member just sits on the chassis and isn't bolted down. This photo will mean very little to anyone else but it took a lot of work because it fits over the chassis reinforcing plate and bolts which would have involved some deft and skilled chisel work. I decided that I had no chance of doing that without wrecking something and used the milling machine to do it instead.

A kwalertee joint and no mistake. Like lorry bodies today things need to be a bit flexible which is why I assume they did it this way.

And from the other side. This is about the only bit of oak you actually see so I used some nice imperial coachbolts (which appear to be close to unobtainable now).

Pause for a moment to admire some copper piping...

And a last look at the brakes before they get covered up. Note also that the drain line wasn't fitted to the R/V vent pipe when we steamed it up. This meant water was blown over everything when it lifted which is why the engine is filthy.

Here is yet another pile of wood which was collected yesterday. 28mm keruing for the deck. Slightly heavier than original but it only comes in 2 sizes now and the smaller size it too thin. The cement and pitch is for my garden path rather than the Sentinel.

And just to show that I do listen to advice here are some drill bits as recommended by @inconsistant. These were certainly the most expensive things I have ever bought for the sole purpose of drilling wood. However, that isn't saying much. Note folding wooden rule which makes me feel like I know what I am doing. I don't have a fag behind my ear but I am getting there.

And I bought a couple of books (one at no small uplift on the cover price) in the hope of learning something useful. Not about wood working, sadly.

 

 

[cobblers]

Flipping lovely stuff, every time I see an update I go and make a coffee and have a sit down with a fun size kitkat to give it a proper read.

If you are ever at a loss for something to do for a while, I'd love someone to explain how the steam injector things work as I just can't get my head round it!

 

 

[JimH]

Most explanations of how an injector works you find are along the lines of 83C's above.

So here it is from the horse's mouth: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Steam_Injectors/zPE_AQAAMAAJ

Happy reading!

[mk2_craig]

On 5/18/2021 at 10:46 AM, JimH said:

I keep going on about this but these waggons cost in the region of £250,000 in today's money

I would be fascinated to know just how close to that quarter mil the project is going to wind up owing you. That is assuming you’ve kept track of the hours put into it. Just the spend on materials must be eye watering?

[somewhatfoolish]

Injectors are just a special kind of eductor; high pressure stuff goes through a nozzle, which accelerates it, creating low and high pressure areas. By tuning the position and size of orifices it can be used to either suck or blow other stuff. High pressure stuff can be anything liquid or gas, other stuff can be liquid, gas or even powder.

[JimH]

On 6/25/2021 at 8:44 PM, 83C said:

More injector bedtime reading: http://kesr-mic.org.uk/resources/The+Steam+Injector.pdf

Also, the BR 'Black Book' has several good diagrams on various injector types.

The GWR paper is one of the better explanations I have read on the subject - I've not seen that before so thanks for that.

By "BR Black Book" I assume you mean the Handbook For Railway Steam Locomotive Enginemen. If that is the case then you are correct - a copy has been sitting on the shelf, unread, for many years and it turns out that there are some very nice colour drawings of injectors and a decent description of how they work including the function of the sliding thibble or jumper nozzles.