Project It is just so Super (Sentinel).

[spartacus]

I'm loving this thread. Every post is an education, (to me at least), and there's a good mix of old school engineering and some modern solutions. More please.

[Mike D]

This is one of my favourite threads on AS, top marks

[Vantman]

That's where my old Saab went to !!!

[JimH]

And very nice it is too. Sadly the bellows on the exhaust gave up the ghost but that is hardly a disaster.

 

Oh, and the handbrake cable snapped.

[Tickman]

Stunning levels of work yet again.

[JimH]

It's been a while. I've not done a huge amount since the lurgey got out because I've been working/home schooling/trying to finish houses/trying to be Capability Sodding Brown. However, someone else has been working largely interupted by having to do any proper work so progress has been brisk.

We left the hubs somewhere near machined. However, there is a lot of things to get inthe right place around these so here is a hub sitting on a dummy axle trying to work out what will go where. It should be pretty clear now what goes where. The straight edge is giving the line of the chain. The brake drum/sprocket bolts to the inside flange and the wheel to the out flange.

 

And if the wheel is to be bolted on then you need some wheel studs. So someone had to stand in front of the lathe making 20 of the buggers.

And you also need a brake drum. These were cast originally but mainly because machining the sprocket on would be expensive we have fabricated our ones. You won't be able to see them when they are on. Here is the rolled drum with the flame cut mounting flange.

Then I missed a load of photos as the drum was bored out, the mounting flange machined and fitted then a mountain of weld piled in joining the two together. So here is a big jump to a welded up and partially machined drum being fitted to the hub.

But the drum also needs some spikey bits for the chain to snag on. These were water jet cut a couple of years back but they needed popped in the big lathe to bore them out to size.

Then once it is at the right size it can be slipped onto the drum ready for welding. This amount of welding tends to pull things all over the shop so there is plenty of machining allowance should anything not end up in the right place. The bit of pipe is temporary. It comes out once everything is welded. The reason that the drum overhangs the sprocket is to form a groove to catch the oil off the chain. Without this the oil runs onto the brake drum and doesn't help slow you down.

Then you need an axle. Here is the second axle. The first bit of bar that was ordered as about 8" to short. You have to laugh, eh? We have to machine it like this because the big Swift is very big but the spindle bore is not big enough to take the axle.

Another view of a long and heavy bit of bar.

And once you have it turned down you can put it all together like this. Surprisingly it slipped together very easily so something must have gone right. A brand new Super Sentinel rear axle. Not too many people built one of these.

 

In all this progress someone got bored and painted a lathe. They aren't DSG's but these Swifts are really nice to work with.

And here is a front hub cap all machined and milled so your feet don't slip off them.

Oh, and while we are at the front axle, what's missing?

That's right. It's these bloody things which are going back for the second time because they are still not right. However, it was our fault they were wrong this time. I thought the front axle was very close to the ground.

As well as front hub caps you need some for the rear. We had a pattern made for these because it was going to be too much of a pain to fabricate them.

And the other cap sitting where it is meant to be. This assembly is very, very heavy.

A pair of boiler clack valves (non-return valves) machined with their seats, valves and spindles in place. These let water from the feed pump and injector pass into the boiler.

And this is the bottle that smooths out the flow from the water pump. This had one or two cracks in it from frost damage so it was brazed up and made to look pretty. It will be painted black.

And Vintage Wings and Radiators made a pair of rear wings for us.

With the correct swoopy trailing edge so they look all fast and high performance.

And finally here is the S4 all back together and ready to go again.

Incidentally I know I tend to rush through these things but I assume that most people don't give much of a toss about the finer points of lining up the drive sprockets. If there is anything you want to know more about just ask. Do understand that the answer might start to get a bit dull.

[Asimo]

Do the sprocket teeth need some sort of surface treatment or hardening? Is the chain something special or have you changed the sprocket teeth to suit something modern and easily available?  

[JimH]

The sprockets are just steel with no surface treatment. The chains are of the roller variety so the relative movement between chain and sprocket is not great. We did exactly the same thing on the last one and they’ve lasted for about 20k so far.

You had a choice of 1.75” or 2” pitch chain back in the day and loads of people still make them in those sizes so we went for the smaller ones because they are more than up to the job. We need to order some of Renolds finest soon.

[JimH]

Things start to look a lot more waggoney these days so pictures of bits of cast steel begin to make more sense. Let's start with a first fit of the rear hubs and brake drums. When we last saw these they were in the lathe being turned. This is what they look like when they come out of the lathe. Note lifting strops. You do not lift these by hand.

And this is what they look like when they are fitted for the first time to make sure all the measurements were somewhere near right. You will also see that there is a bit of chain held in place with some rope. This was to let us count up what chain we needed to buy.

And from the front. It should now be clear how it works and why the crankshaft needed to have so many gears in it. Also in shot is the alternator which takes a chain drive off the back of the main drive sprocket. This is not original but the original set up looked shit, didn't work  and you couldn't spin the dynamos of the day fast enough to get any meaningful output from them. This set up will let us spin the alternator fast enough to be able to drive round with full beam on at night. 

This is actually the smaller chain you could specify. If you were knocking seven bells out of the waggon you could opt for 2" pitch chains but these are more than enough for what we are doing. You will also see that everything lines up. Chain is surprisingly cheap these days even for Renold stuff.

The alternator (it is an alternator in a dynamo looking body) so you can see the chain sprockets. Once the body is on you won't see any of this.

Now we have some brake drums that just leaves the brake shoes to sort out. First you need a shaft to work the brakes. This is worked fairly hard so we've gone for EN24. Here is the shaft being turned down and having a thread cut on the end.

And this is the paddle that screws onto the end. The brake arms turn the shaft and the paddle forces the shoes out. Modern wagon drums work in the same way.

And these springs turned up. These hold the brake shoes about where they are meant to be. In the original set up these were the only return springs but on the steam brake modification there is a pair of big springs doing that job so we aren't asking very much of these.

While in turning up mood these arrived too. They are the castings for the body mounting brackets. These bolt to the chassis rails and then mountings that are bolted to the oak bearers mate with these. I think the idea was to try to keep things flexible. For some reason this photo is upside down.

And the S can't go out because the boiler inspector isn't coming out yet because lurgey so a historic wrong is being righted. When the paint was put on in 2008 something went wrong with the sides and we've not bothered to put it right. Here is some paint being subject to some major correction. Fortunately all of the paint which has gold leaf on it is fine. This is a relief.

And at last we come to something that is almost, sort of related to the work of Autoshite. If you jump back to page 1, picture 1 you will see that the dominant feature of the cab are the two oddly shaped plates that fill in the gaps between the windscreens and the front panel which we shall call the cheek plates. Originally these were pressed and then "fitted" into whatever shape each finished waggon took. If you consider the manufacturing techniques, the materials involved and the tolerance between bolts and the holes shown in the drawings there must have been a lot of variation. Anyway, pressing them isn't an option so we'll have to do these by hand. This is a shame because I'm not a tin basher.

What we did do was bought a copy of the DVD from this man here https://metalshapingzone.com/  . Which I would strongly recommend buying. I am sure there are others but this one is very helpful for no other reason than the rather important lesson that if something is going wrong just keep hitting until it goes right. The early stages of shaping something seem to be very disheartening and it was reassuring to see that when someone who knows what they are doing starts a job it also looks like you've driven over it.

Anyway. some bits of 18swg sheet steel cut roughly to the right sort of shape so you have enough metal but not too much. The rotten piece of steel is roughly what we are trying to make. It was pulled from a river bed in Cumbria in the late 1980s so it's had a hard life. If you look carefully at the pattern you'll see felt tip pen markings on it. I came up with a plan to make it in three pieces. and the black lines show roughly what the three pieces will need to look like.

And you need some hammers. We have amassed a fair collection of body hammers, spoons, slappers and dollies. If only we knew what we were doing with them. You can probably make out that the square faced  hammer is a shrinking hammer.

And because we are bashing curves then some stakes are a good idea too. A few years ago we found a job lot of stakes which I suspect came out of a school workshop and they come on all sorts of shapes and sizes. This is the one I have found the most useful. What I don't have just now is a picture of the leather sand bag which is also essential for hitting things.

And off we go. I started by taking a best guess at the development of the slightly conical shape is was aiming for and formed it in the folders. I am quite sure those who know what they are doing are laughing already and I'm going to need to spend an age dressing out the fold marks but it was a start. Once the cone shape was there you need to start forming the flange where it fixes to the apron plate (they are rivetted in). Here is the start of the offside one. You can probably see that the flange is pretty tight at the top and then eases as you come along the front apron. The exact curve is difficult to get right but when it is wrong you can see it straight away so you just keep working until it looks right.

And you just keep working it until it goes right. It is painfully slow. You can also see I've been messing around with a slapper dressing out the fold marks. I reckon that it is fitting pretty well here.

And from the side. You will also see that the offside door got made and fitted too. You should be ble to see why the flange has to be stretched and dressed into shape because you are trying to form more than one curve. I am pretty sure that this is why apprenticeships used to be seven years long.

The panels are handed so while we have a pattern for an off side one there isn't anything to copy for the nearside. What I decided to do was to get one bit of the offside done then straight away do the same section on the near side. That way I wouldn't forget how I made the bloody thing and the chances of making things look right from side to side got better. This is the nearside one somewhere near. It is not easy to make out but it should be possible to see where the curves are and why they have taken a lot of stretching and dressing to get the flange right. The piece of angle iron is part ofthe cab. That is what the windscreen sits over.

Then flushed with success I pressed on with the second section of the nearside one. You can't make it out but the apron is curved across the front (about a 12 foot radius) so there was yet another curve to fit this to. It is about this point that the clamp situation became critical so more were ordered.

And from the side. The join between the apron plate and the cheek plates is "hidden" by a D beading that is formed around the top of the apron plate. Note clamps everywhere.

The butt hasn't been fitted properly yet but it is getting there. Once it is in the right place it I'll gas weld it. You see both the inside and the outside of these panels so the welds will need to be good.

And that then leaves the spherical bit to fill in the corner. I only got this started last weekend so it is still a work in progress. Stretched it with a ball pein hammer over the sandbag and then just keep dressing it over the stake until the shape starts to appear.

See? It curves in both directions. Note the elderly Sykes Pickavant body hammer. Nice hammer that.

So this weekend's job is to keep hitting that until it fits and then start tacking things up.

[dollywobbler]

Amazing stuff, as usual.

[Saabnut]

I wish I was as bad* at tin bashing as you are! Fantastic, please keep the updates coming, this remains my favourite thread!

[captain_70s]

One of the best threads on here by miles!

A crazy amount of work going into this thing and it shows.

[adw1977]

On 7/10/2020 at 4:37 PM, JimH said:

The rotten piece of steel is roughly what we are trying to make. It was pulled from a river bed in Cumbria in the late 1980s

I'm intrigued.  Was an entire Sentinel pulled from a river bed? Or just that piece and by some miracle someone knew what it was?

[JimH]

18 hours ago, adw1977 said:

I'm intrigued.  Was an entire Sentinel pulled from a river bed? Or just that piece and by some miracle someone knew what it was?

Not quite an entire one. One went down a ravine in Cumbria back in the late 20s (one story says it ran out of brakes, another says it was an insurance job) and for years what was left after the locals had salvaged what they could lay in the river. A lad from Appleby had known about it for a while and finally got round to sorting out the ownership of the wreckage so he could recover it. By the time it was dragged up what was left amounted to the boiler, the front part of the chassis, the front axle and wheels, the steering box and the remains of the cab. The waggon hit nearside first dso that side of the cab was mashed. The offside at least survived to be of some use building a few cabs. 

The waggon got rebuilt (as a flat bed on pneumatics rather than a tipper on solids - not that I am complaining because I hate tippers), lived in Scotland for a couple of decades and I think it has gone to live down in Cumbria again. I believe it is black these days.

[somewhatfoolish]

Why the tipper hate, or is the mechanism?

[JimH]

1. They're ugly. The S4 doesn't look too bad but that just looks like a short waggon with a big body. This was down to the location of the water tanks. On the S4 the tanks are in the cab whereas the Supers and DGs has the tank slung under the chassis behind the rear axle. On a tipper it had to be relocated to just behind the cab and the tipping body gets pushed back and I really don't like that. On top of that most Sentinel tippers are three way ones so they have to have stupid rear wings on them. Our S4 is an end tipper so it has standard rear wings which helps to keep things looking more normal and less tippery.

A Super Sentinel tipper, yesterday.

2. Tipping bodies are nightmare to build. There is a lot (and I mean a lot) of rolled sections, teak and mahogany go into a tipping body. They are complicated, take a lot of riveting and a lot of wood. This is a lot of effort to go to for something that doesn't look good.

3. They are heavy. Like properly heavy. The tipping body on the S weighs about a ton which is a lot of weight to lug around for no good reason. It is worse on the Supers because later Sentinels used the boiler feed pump for hydraulic power whereas the earlier wagons used an injector (black magic device that produces a pressure higher than what you blow into it - real voodoo stuff) which needed a much bigger tipping cylinder. By big I mean about 12" bore. It is a truly massive bronze casting. Depending on the design of the body you are carrying 1 to 1.5 tons more than you need to be.

4. This doesn't apply to the Supers but the S4 tippers had a very short wheelbase which meant that the engine is pushed hard up against the boiler and is very close to the rear axle. That doesn't sound terrible until you want to slightly modify the valve timing...

- Remove the cam gear covers.

- Realise the cam gear covers cannot be removed because the boiler is in the way.

- Opt to lower the front of the engine down to allow the cam gear covers to be removed.

-Lift up the tipping body and prop it in place.

- Realise that lowering the engine will mean removing the prop shaft.

- Once the prop shaft is unbolted find out that because the shaft is so short there is not enough movement in the sliding joint to let the UJ clear the flywheel nut.

- Block up the rear of the waggon and remove the pins from the rear springs. Now you can move the rear axle back a couple of inches.

- Now you can remove the prop shaft.

- Now with the overhead crane you can fight the engine mounts off and lower the engine to the ground.

- Remove cam gear covers.

- Modify valve timing.

- Refitting is the reverse of removal.

And some people thing they have it hard with Citroen CXs. The S4 was rebuilt as a tipper because it was built as a tipper and it was one of the few end tippers left. We regretted starting down that road from pretty much the first job we did and we are still regretting it now.

[JimH]

With a Super you should be pottering along at no more than 4 gallons to the mile. With the standard 170 gallon tank that gives you about 30-35 miles before you need to start looking for water which is a pain in the arse if you are trying to get somewhere. The S4 has a 450 gallon tank inside the tipping body which helps the range enormously. With the new Super there wil be the original tank behind the rear axle and then we'll make a pair of tanks to sit inside the body. My calculator tells me that will give us about 350 gallons which is a bit lower than I would like but shouldn't be too bad. That means you can bimble along at about 70-80 miles between stops.

You can see the water tank in this photo - this should be pretty much the same as what the new one will look like but without the solids. We'll sit the tanks inside over the rear axle to keep some weight over them.

[JimH]

Water is easy enough - you just carry a standpipe, hose and hydrant key. You aren't really supposed to do it but we've never been told off yet. Most of our running around is north of the border where the water is good enough to drink so we don't bother with any boiler treatments. The number of running hours is pretty tiny. If you were running day in day out then you'd probably take a lot more care over what you were putting in there.

The tipping rams are just bonkers. There were all sorts of problems trying to fit everything in around the axle(s) and engine as well as position the ram in such a place as would let the body tip in one of three ways. What it meant was that to fit it in and keep the ram short the tipping cylinder is very close to the pivot point of the body which means that the load on the ram is very, very significant and the pressure needed in the cylinder is very high indeed and way in excess of the boiler pressure. Very late in the day some people messed around with engine driven oil pumps coupled to proper multi-stage hydraulic rams  (I have  seen a photo of one Foden steamer with such a set up and I believe the Argentinian Sentinels had proper hydraulics) for the tipping gear but by then the game was well and truly up.

[JimH]

Things didn't pan out quite as they should but it's mostly forward movement. Here are most of the bits to make up the nearside cheekplate.

And here is 67% of the offside one

You should be able to see why it needed so much hitting to form the flanges on them so they can rivet to the apron plate. It starts off tight at the top then eases as you move further down the curve. Our guess is that these presented some difficulty to Sentinel. Our justification for this is that to the uninitiated (YCRTA go to pubs and talk to girls) the Super and its successor the DG look pretty much the same. However, there is almost nothing shared bewteen the two waggons. About the only thing that is common between the two models is the front of the cab. Why did they go to the effort to update almost everything (mostly in the name of weight saving) yet these bloody cheekplates were just the same. Seems very odd. Anyway, you can probably make out that there is still a lot of dressing to do on these before they are presentable.

It isn't very clear from the picture but this one is fitting around curves on three axes which is a great thing to cut your tin bashing teeth on.

Yeah, yeah, all well and good but why are they still in bits and not welded together. Well, the main reason is that in the process of hitting them I became more and more bothered that the apron was not quite right. We'd made a bit of a faux pas when it was fitted and the curves around the front of the cab were not right. We'd sort of ignored it in a "we'll sort that out later" sort of a way but it became apparent that the only way of dealing with it was to throw it away and start again. You'll see a lot of clamps around the front. That is us forming some supports for the apron plate that aren't meant to be there but we added on the last one to keep the curve right at the top of the apron plate.

Ah well, it's only money. This is 2mm plate (a frazzle thinner than 14gauge) which it turns out is somewhat heavier than it was meant to be. We'll take the opportunity (always look on the posititve side) to go for 18 gauge sheet. We also took the opportunity of this one being scrap to form the D beading around the top edge. This has to be done hot so it means we won't have to put heat anywhere near the new one. See - we should be glad that we made a mess of the first one. Once the new apron is on then the cheekplates can get fitted and finished off.

What we will do now the front is off is do all of the pipework, make the chimney and make the boiler cladding. That is very much easier with the cab in pieces. What else has gone on? Well flush with success at hitting 18gauge I thought I would make a start on the water tank ends. Turns out that forming 14 gauge is a wee bit harder. Originally these were pressed which isn't really an option so like the cheek plates these will need to be made in sections and gas welded together. Take sheet of 14gauge and mark it out so the corners can be tweaked on in the folder. The ends slip inside the body of the tank and are then riveted in.

What is then needed s to make up the curves for the top corners and the bottom corners. Look on the top of the tank and you will see attempt one at forming the big corner. It is very much harder to stretch 2mm plate by hitting it with a bossing mallet. This attempt was not successful and we've gone back to the drawing board.

We've had a picture like this before but what is that G Clamp doing there?

It's holding the brake shoe on so we can measure things. Brakes that work. Well swanky.

It took most of last weekend to do these bloody things. I don't know what the lining is made from but even touching it makes you itch like crazy. It was a bit of a pig to drill the stuff so it could be riveted on.

The rivets were closed in the hydraulic press. I thought they looked pretty good.

The upshot is that they fit spot on to the drums so we need very little movement on the shoes to apply the brakes fully. This is good because it leaves plenty of movement in the brake cylinder in reserve.

So now we just need the front springs to come back (yet a bloody gain - they made new top leaves but made them from the wrong stock because they had run out of the right size. This meant they didn't fit in our spring hangers *rolls eyes*) and the tyres for the back to turn up and it will be able to sit down on its wheels for the first time.

[UltraWomble]

 

Is this similar to yours?

[dozeydustman]

If I haven't said it yet, I'll say it now.

I'm in absolute awe at this project. When Mrs Dustman asked me what I was looking at I showed her the whole thread. Mrs Dustman is now in awe at this thread.

I like engineering, in particular exposed, or well done engineering. It's the only reason I like looking as steam locomotives and traction engines. A lot of the engineering in steam lorries is hidden, but I know it's good solid stuff underneath!

[dozeydustman]

I did try posting about 15 mins ago but it wouldn't go.

Absolute awe at this project. well done sir.

 

EDIT - it posted 5 times. Apologies. Have removed superfluous posts

[JimH]

That is a DG which is the model after the Super. The big “development” over the Super is that it has a gearbox with a running gear and a get you out the shit bottom gear. This may have been an improvement when you were shifting loads but now we only play with them now so yes you get a bottom gear but you also have a pair of large, straight cut spur gears howling away on the road which I absolutely hate. 

They look very similar but almost nothing is shared between them.

[mat_the_cat]

8 hours ago, dozeydustman said:

EDIT - it posted 5 times.

I think that's justified, given the epic work going on.

[JimH]

Best have another update.

Some bending rolls. These can only do 1/8th plate and they are a little old and worn but even rather old bending rolls sell for lots of money. As soon as they get big enough to earn their keep the prices get silly.

So, you take your rolls and you wrestle with a 3m sheet of 18 swg steel and you end up with this.

Which is the start of the boiler cladding. This is one of the more irritating jobs because it is very visible and easy to make a mess of. It is in two parts - one above the footplate and a smaller one below. Here is the beginnings of the top bit. The holes that are cut in it are just the pilot holes trying to locate the centre of each of the boiler fittings. The idea is to get theholes in the cladding as tight as possible to each fitting so the thing isn't littered with closing plates and other things you need to fit when you have made a not very good job of it. Under the cladding sits about an inch of ceramic fibre blanket. This is effective enough to keep the temperatures in the cab down to "unbearable".

These are the start of the brake arms. They will weld to the bosses on the brake shafts and a yoke is formed at the other end to take the brake rod and adjuster. Water jet cutting really is the business. When we did the last one we were having to flame cut all of this which was slower, more expensive and the things took a lot of finishing. The straight arm with a square cut out the end is the start of the grate lowering lever. This lets you stand back a bit when you drop the fire. A bit.

We've had  few pictures of these already but here is the rear drum again. This time everything is hammered up hard, the bearings are glued in and the wheel studs are on. 10 metres of drive chain has been ordered.

Fitted, glued and tighted. Modern adhesives are splendid things indeed.

Hallelujah! The front springs turned up for the fourth time and this time they were right! Wheel studs fitted and glued. It was about to get the axle final fitted when this was taken.

Don't worry, it's oak so it is plenty strong enough. When they converted to pneumatics you needed to put a big metal spacer between the front axle and the spring to get a bit more clearance under the footplate. This one is just temporary because it needs to be sitting on all fours with some weight on the rear springs to know where to set the front height. This means that everything sits level. Once the spacer thickness is set then the proper bolts for holding the axle on can be made.

Tightening the front hubs onto their tapers takes the biggest impact gun you have. In this case you need a 3" AF socket which we didn't have. Kennedy will sell you a new impact socket for the scarcely believable price of £27.00 including VAT and delivery. It is a very big socket. For scale those are  big spanners next to it. You'll also make out 3" stamped on the side. When this arrived it was possible to hammer the front axles up for the final time.

A while back I started on the water tank which didn't go very far. It then dawned that the water tank was going to become important soon so I thought I'd better have another go. Sadly this involves trying to form 14SWG sheet by hand which takes quite a lot of sweat. Here is one of the tank ends making progress. I folded the curves on the straight sections in the folder and then beat the living daylights out of 14 gauge sheet untill they started to look like the curved sections it needed. Then I gas welded them in. Sheet as thick as this is a pain to work but lovely to gas weld. The big hole is so you can get inside to clean them out or if you are making them, to put the rivets in.

Originally the ends were pressed which wasn't really an option on our budget so we need to fabricate them. All welds are butts. Once the tank is assembled and rivetted it goes off for galvanising so I don't have the option of hiding things under filler and paint. These wleds aren't dressed out yet - there are still a few places where the whole job can turn to shit and it will need to be thrown away to start again. I didn't want to spend too long making one weld look just dandy only for it to look good in the scrap pile. One of the worst things about this job is knowing that when this one is done there is an identical one to make for the other end.

The small corners are harder to make than the large ones. Again, the weld hasn't been fettled yet so it looks more gash than I would like it to. Proper gas welders would also point out that my hands are probably better suited to being a shaker boy in a cocktail lounge. The end is held in place with 5/16" rivets put in at 1.25" centres. There are a lot of them. The curve looks flat in this picture. It isn't, I promise.

This is the start of the second small corner. Take a piece of steel and attack it with a ball pein hammer until it starts to stretch into something like the shape you want.

Two curves for the price of one. The thing is that when you watch the pros doing this they make it look easy because they are almost always working in something that is car body thickness. By the time things get this thick you need to hit it really hard. The blocking mallet in the photo doesn't really cut it.

What else? Here is the brake shoes being fitted up for the last time ready for the hub and drum to go on for the final time.

Oh yeah, this was the other important step forwards. Here is the front end sitting on its wheels for the first time. Those are the rear wheels that it is sitting on  - the front wheels have fewer holes in them. Another four tyres are on order so it will be on its rear wheels soon.

You can probably start to appreciate what a really bad design the front axle is on these things.

We needed to get wheels on the front so the props could be shifted out the way. This lets us start running copper pipes which join the hot and/or wet bits together. This is why the water tank became a bit more important - it won't be too long before we can put some heat on the boiler.

 

 

 

[JimH]

When we left the water tank one end was nearly finished. Here is the same end a little bit less unfinished. Amazingly the damn thing fitted without too much of a fight.

And after doing that we got a bot bored of hitting things so started on the internal baffles. The 8mm bar is temporary formwork. The seam is only tacked at this point.

One of the more depressing things about making more than one of a thing is that you know you are going to have to start all over again. Here's the second end about to be started.

The other bit that needed doing was that the tank end covers were set into the tank ends. Originally this was part of the pressing but that wasn't happening do it needed to be fabricated. We had some rings jet cut and then olled up some 1/8th flat bar which was gas welded together. This would then be welded into the tank end to make the thing look pressed. One nice thing about gas welding new, heavy plate is that it makes you feel like a gas welding god. Even a chimp could make a jod job of wleds like this.

Super neat. But then everything is easy if you are sitting at the bench. Try it lying on your back and things get a bit harder.

And here it is welded into the end of the tank with the cover bolted in.

Close up it doesn't look too bad. Yes I know the bolts are metric - we ran out of 1/2" whit stuff.

And not content with hitting things until my arms fell off I started dressing out one of the welds. Not there yet but heading in the right direction. I'm quite looking forward to rebuilding the 944 with 20gauge steel instead of this boiler plate.

And here is the second end making progress. This is the end you can see so I was hoping that the practice on the other end would mean this one was better. I changed the way I bashed the curves which reduced the number of welds which needed dressed.

Only one weld instead of two. Less welding, less dressing.

Enough with the bloody water tank. What else has been going on? Here is the sprocket carrier having the hex milled on it. The hex is needed to hold the sprocket while the driveshaft nuts are tightened.

The new chains arrived. We went for Dunlop ones in the end because they were cheaper. Here is the offside one being fitted for length.

And here is a close up of a big chain. It was nice to use new ones. On the last one we used second hand ones which were a pain in the arse to clean.

And here is the nearside one fitted up. Everything is fitted and tighted and glued and just waiting for the tyres to arrive.

And after a lurgey related delay here they are. All that is needed now is some blood, sweat and tears to fit them.

Which we did and so - drum roll - here it is sitting on all fours for the first time. It looks a lot smaller on its wheels mainly because it is now sitting about six inches lower than it was.

Here are the slightly righter front wheels. You don't notice the slightly later pattern wheels on the rear because they are turned inside out.

Now it is on all fours it is possible to route the pipes which send water oil and steam to the right places. Here is a few quids' worth of heavy wall copper pipe to be tweaked and teased into a pretty shape.

The steering box is getting fitted up finally so that can go in which will let us move it to a slight more convenient spot.

Couldn't help myself. More water tank. The second end got finished but before I did any more I wanted to do a trial fit. Didn't want to rivet it all up and find it was half an inch too wide. Here it is hanging from ratchet straps. When it is fitted properly it will hang from steel straps.

Some curves looking reasonably curvy. I'm quite pleased with this.

Tight fit at the front. When all you had was this tank you were permanently short of water. This one will have some extra tanks inside the body so this one is largely for show.

I won't go into this too much but here are some pictures of the numerous fiddly bits that have been made just for the mechanical lubricator. This is an engine driven pump that injects steam oil into the main steam supply to the engine which keeps the valves and pistons lubricated. If you haven't seen steam oil it is like treacle only thicker. It is taking a long time to rebuild this from what we managed to get hold of.

 

 And on the lighter side of the news we have managed to end up with two Coventry Climax Godiva light portable pumps. This one appeared some years ago and then another came when I bought the Goddess. This one had been lying around and the valves had hung up in the guides. I thought it would be good the for older offspring to start learning to take stuff to bits to sort the problem. What was fascinating (everything about Coventry Climax is fascinating - go and look them up) was the sheer quality of these FW engines. They are truly amazing things and built to a standard that would make you weep. They look like Imp engines but the Imp engine was a cheapened, productionised version of this little gem. You may notice that this has a duplex cam chain and the Imp didn't. A really, really lovely thing to work on.

 Anyone interested in taking it on? If so let me know. If not I've been pondering building a Lotus Eleven replica using this engine as a starting point.

[Mr Pastry]

1 hour ago, JimH said:

If not I've been pondering building a Lotus Eleven replica using this engine as a starting point.

If you haven't already done so, research it properly.  A lot of differences between the pump engine and the car engine.  Ask me how I know. 

[JimH]

Oh this is just blowing smoke.

Out of interest what are the main differences? I assumed the manifolds were very different and the flywheel and backplate would be a bit more starter motorey and it would have coil ignition instead of the magneto. What else?

[Mr Pastry]

13 hours ago, JimH said:

Out of interest what are the main differences?

I did this experimentally for a client years ago, using bits of someone else's unfinished conversion.  At that time there were no specific parts available to do it, and the Climax "experts" were not very forthcoming.  The right crowd and no crowding, no doubt.  The situation may be different now.  I may have some old info somewhere.. 

A lot of the external bits are different as you suggest, but will mostly bolt on.

The main problems were - Car engine has a steel crank rather than C.I, at least officially. which may or may not bother you, and different rear oil seal arrangement.   Flywheel, clutch, backplate and starter were the real headache, as there was no readily available ring gear to fit the fire pump flywheel.  It was a slippery slope from there.  Obvs. depends a bit on your choice of gearbox but it was tricky with the A series which we were using.

Edit:   I am going back 20 years with this and a quick Google search suggests that the flywheel/backplate, etc. parts are now available. Also check which pump you have, as some of them were based on the larger capacity FWB block and steel crank, hence more suitable and sought after for conversion.  

Edited September 24, 2020 by Mr Pastry

[JimH]

If some one had an interest in Coventry Climax and the things it got up to and the products it made are there any books they should be trying to track down?