Still Plugging Away....
Well, it has been quite awhile since I have updated this page, so I will bring you up to speed on what has transpired since last fall.....
Several days were spent getting the flywheel cleaned up and primed. I had really underestimated the amount of work it would take to do it, but now it is done. If I had it to do over again, I would have sandblasted the flywheel prior to bringing it into the building. Instead, I used a couple of hundred dollars worth of flap discs and wire brushes on my 4 1/2" Milwaukee grinder and "blitzed" the rust, crud and old filler off. It was a filthy, nasty job and I didn't get any pictures of it because I did not want to expose the camera to all that nastiness.
Once that was done, the next thing on the agenda was to clean up the valves and put them back in their "holes", and to get the piston back into the cylinder. I bought a number of little sanding sponges at Walmart for $1.87 each. They are about 2 1/2" wide and 4" long and coated with a fine abrasive. I have done a lot of experimenting with various abrasives while trying to polish various parts of the engine. Two products that really work great are these sanding sponges and Scotchbrite EXL polishing and deburring wheels which I mount on an arbor on a motor. Anyway, back to the valves. The valves are about 3 inches in diameter and a foot long. They rotate in holes machined in each end of the cylinder, intake valves on the top corners of the cylinder, exhaust valves on the bottom. The valves were a little worn, but the wear was pretty uniform and it looked like they should work just fine so I polished them up so they were clean and smooth and laid them aside. Cleaning the holes they work in was accomplished by punching holes through a sanding sponge and fastening it to a broom handle with plastic wire ties. It worked a lot like a bottle brush and did a good job of cleaning up the "holes", which were gummed up with dried oil, dirt and a bit of rust. It took just a couple of hours to get it all cleaned up again.
With the valves ready to go in, it was time to think about reinstalling the piston. The piston was lightly covered with a layer of fine dirt and dried oil, so it did not take long to shine it up with some 400 grit emery paper and a bit of solvent. The rings are eccentric rings, with a step joint and are almost an inch wide. Interesting enough, one ring was about 10 thou wider than the other, so it seems that they were fitted to the piston. I took the rings down to Bill Klemm's shop and used his bead blaster to lightly clean the sides and inside surfaces. The face of the rings were lightly sanded with 400 grit emery paper to remove any dirt or dried oil on them. The rings were then laid aside and I went to work cleaning out the cylinder with my "sponge on a stick". When I first removed the head from the engine, the bore was shiny and oily inside. Having it apart for over a year, the oil had attracted some dirt and there was some very light surface rust. So, after a bit of polishing, the bore was looking very nice so I mopped it with oil and tried the rings in the bore to see how they fit. They fit very nice and had lots of tension. Satisfied with that, I installed them on the piston and got Paul to help me put the piston back in the cylinder. We had to improvise a ring compressor from a big hose clamp, but it went together quite nicely.
With that out of the way, I next turned my attention to the crosshead. The bottom crosshead shoe was originally lined with babbitt, which was pretty well worn out. This engine is like a lot of early engines and has vee shaped crosshead ways, with an included angle of 150 degrees. So... I made up a little dam to keep the babbitt where I wanted it, poured some new babbitt into the cast iron shoe and set up the Bridgeport to flycut it to the proper angle. Here is the end result:
In the second photo, the shoe on the right is the original top shoe, which was virtually new and was returned to service.
I cleaned up the crosshead ways and reassembled the crosshead. A little prussian blue showed me that the angle was right on the rebabbitted and flycut shoe, I had nearly 100% contact with almost no scraping. I doubt I could ever do it that good again. Sometimes ya just get lucky.
The next operation was to level up the crosshead, so that the piston rod did not move up or down as it passed in and out of the cylinder. I screwed the piston rod into the crosshead and adjusted the shoes so that the piston rod seemed level when I put a shaft level on it. I then pulled the crosshead back until the piston struck the rear cylinder head, so that as much of the piston rod was exposed as possible. To see if the piston rod was paralell to the ways, I stuck a magnetic indicator base on a piece of flat steel, about 2 by 4 inches by 1/2" thick. The idea was to slide the indicator up and down the ways with an indicator touching the top of the rod. The edge of the flat stock would be against the inside angle of the crosshead vee, so I should be able to move the indicator back and forth (with a little care) and get a fairly good idea of whether the rod was paralell to the ways or not. It actually took longer to type this than it did to do it. The rod was about ten thou too high at the back of the ways and it took just a few quick adjustments of the shoe to correct it. When I was done, the rod measured out of paralell by just over two thou, most of which was probably actually the wear in the ways and my shaky hands.
With that out of the way, the packing was cut for the piston rod, put into place and the packing gland tightened up fairly snug.
As you can tell, I got sort of lax at taking photos and documenting what was done. This is the second year into it and I was getting pretty rammy to get the engine running, so the pics and the website sort of just fell by the wayside.....
I started to clean up the connecting rod, so that it could be put into place, the next operation being to set the piston rod to it's exact length, having equal clearance on each end of the cylinder when it was at inner or outer dead center.
I was very surprised to find a date stamped on the end of the connecting rod, 6-24-89! Now, the engine has a birthday of June 24, 1889. This was almost certainly the day that it was first assembled in the Reliance Works of E. P. Allis.
The markings are sort of faint, and I took a dozen photos and this one was the best of the lot, trust me, you can see it pretty good in person.
Once the connecting rod was in place, the piston rod was adjusted and the jam nut locked for what I hope to be the last time for quite a while!
I then turned to the valve bonnets. They got the final polishing, packings and gaskets were cut and installed and I started to bolt them in place.
Don Blausey made all the lagging for the cylinder, carefully duplicating the original. At this point, Don put the lagging over the new insulation (non asbestos, of course!). The lagging really set off the polished iron and brass on the engine. Too bad I didn't get any photos, but it was time to get the thing running, we can get photos later.
I will add more later, but the next page is photos of the engine from when we ran it for the first time!
