Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Engineering in Miniature

Next it was time for what to me has always been the elephant in the room – the boiler. Boiler making is a complete departure from all the skills required to construct a locomotive to this point. There is no machining, just annealing, hammering, bending, drilling and soldering copper with lots of heat and frustrating leaks en route to the finished product. My friend Mike has a penchant for boiler design and thus completely redrew the boiler plans of the original Piddington/Scarf design, following the parameters of Henry Greenly and Jim Ewan. The fire grate area remained the same but the boiler, a seamless copper tube of 4½-inch diameter, now has: 13 tubes of ½-inch outside diameter (OD) x 13-inch long, 20 SWG Two superheater flues of ⅓-inch OD x…

This article describes the construction of a 1.4cc twostroke petrol engine utilising Milford Mite model aircraft diesel engine components, combining these with parts from a second engine both owned since the late 1950s. Selected parts are shown in Photo 1. The result of this project is shown nearing completion in Photo 2. ‘Mite’ is stamped on the cylinder block flange, a Hall Effect sensor is in place. The Milford Mite is described by model engine expert Adrian Duncan in great detail on the internet (www.modelenginenews.org/ad/m_mite.html) and seems to have been judged as England's worst-ever of its type. Its capacity is 1.409cc with a bore diameter of 15/32 inches and a stroke of ½-inch. The project incorporates the Milford cylinder block, cylinder, piston and cylinder head. The crankshaft, con rod and…

Biographies of renowned engineers can make for interesting reading, and they don't come much more renowned than the Brunels – well at least partly. While Isambard Kingdom is widely regarded as a ‘Great Briton’, his father Marc is much less well known – yet he played a vital role in his son's rise to fame. In this highly readable account, Anthony Burton describes how Marc, a refugee from the French Revolution, pioneered mass-production technology, especially for sailing ships, and was responsible for major engineering achievements of his own, most notably the first tunnel bored under the River Thames in London. Isambard spent his early years of employment working with and for his father, and once it is highlighted in these pages the older Brunel's influence is highly evident in many…

Most builders of these engines buy their kits on a monthly basis and have them delivered, so the kits have to be packed to withstand the rigours of being handled by couriers. Each kit is packed in one or more substantial cardboard boxes secured with plenty of reinforced tape, with a label on each giving the kit number, box number where there is more than one box per kit, and importantly the weight of the box as some of the boxes weigh more than 25kg. Inside the box, or in box 1 where there are multiple boxes, there is a clear plastic wallet which has a packing list, assembly instructions and hints, and isometric drawings. The individual components with their appropriate fasteners are wrapped in bubble wrap or in clear…

Once more the last month on the Fairbourne Railway has been much more about the operation of the line as opposed to engineering, as one might expect in the peak season of August. Though operating the railway does create some interesting engineering problems in itself! Before we get onto these though, the Simplex that I described regauging in the September EIM had a series of gauging trials and then load testing. It performed extremely well with all of these, careful measuring meaning that even the tightest loading gauge didn't cause any problems. Unfortunately however the trials did uncover an issue with the loco's wheel profiles, I had hoped to leave them as they were but certain sections of the main station pointwork are ⅛-inch under gauge, specifically the dual-gauge stub…

At last I was going to be able to start the last part of my locomotive restoration project, renovating and improving the locomotive bodywork, but first I had to get the paint off and get back to bare metal. The problem was the paint was extremely thick and covered in a thick layer of varnish that was all very difficult to remove. It took several sessions with paint stripper, each with a 24-hour soak, an oven cleaner and even more work with paint brush restorer liquid before I was getting anywhere near a state that I could start work on it. In the end it was a boring and tedious job and I was surprised how thick the paint was as a lot of the fittings looked more detailed and…

The very first article I wrote for this magazine was published in January 2015. The following article series, starting in November that year, described my entry into the Live Steam hobby which had actually started in September 2000, with the building of a simple 4-4-0 ‘American’ engine, completed in 724 days. During these years, I've had the privilege of sharing my experiences with you readers, ‘successes as well as mishaps’, as I once described my hobby. Due to the fact that I've had very little free time to pursue the hobby during the past two or three years, what with the health issues mentioned last time (I'm already 71 as you read this!), having other simultaneous hobby projects, and, to boot, catching Covid in April this year, I've really had…

One of the jobs I have been working on recently is the regulator of a 7¼-inch gauge express passenger locomotive, which had come in with this particular control seized following two years of Covid-induced storage. It's fair to say that I have a love-hate relationship with this engine – it's been in service for around 10 years now, supposedly being in a fit condition to run, but we just keep finding problems with it! We are gradually working our way through the list, starting with correcting the draughting on it, having discovered that half the exhaust was just filling the smokebox and not going up the chimney, unsurprisingly resulting in very poor steaming characteristics. One of the most concerning items has been the regulator, something to which we have no…

NEWS German Team, FH Aachen & Reuschling emerged victorious in the annual Railway Challenge staged by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and held at the 10¼-inch gauge Stapleford Miniature Railway on 23rd-26th June. The Railway Challenge pits teams of students, apprentices and young professionals against each other, tasked with following a system-engineering process to develop, build and test a railway locomotive that meets specific competition objectives. Runner-up of the seven entrants in this year's event was the team from Transport for London while Alstom & University of Derby took third spot. Aachen & Reuschling topped a series of on-track challenges, including reliability, traction, maintenance, noise, ride comfort and energy storage, and off-track ones ranging through design, innovation, technical poster and the best business case. Organising committee chairman Professor Simon Iwnicki…