Thanks Fred. My brain runneth over with brass stuff. And now I have Ron telling me to think about plain old steel! Ron, Is there insulation under that wood? If so, are there any sort of rings under or near to being under the external straps? I have an 1.5" thick fiberglass blanket between my boiler ...

Last post should have been directed to Don. Sorry.

And Ken, it turns out that Admiralty Brass is Naval Brass under a different name. Oh, well. Maybe just call it Paris Hilton Custom Brass. She has a lot of brass.

Ken, I see what you are saying about the 48" max dimension on the sheet stock. But when I enter in a custom cut of 1" x 76" it accepts it. I'll call them on Monday and see what is available. I have a backup plan of going to stainless. Any larger sheet metal shop has it in sheets 96" long and can she...

I'm getting ready to order up the brass strips to hold my boiler lagging in place. The most convenient source for me is Online Metals in the U.S. as my local supplier in Seattle has a $150 minimum and fairly serious shipping and handling charges. The choices are either 260 (ASTM B36) cartridge brass...

Thanks Ron.

I called a friend with a barn full of old car stuff and he has a fuel pump from an early Chrysler product that has a vacuum pump as half of it. Says that with no flow it pulls 20" of vacuum.

Boy have we hijacked this thread. Sorry Jon!

Den (farmerden) has one on his boat and some time when he is looking the other way I'm going to whack him behind the ear with a Stilson wrench and steal his long enough to take off dimensions. The 'navy' pump design like Dave Fogg's uses the same theory of operation but is double acting. Has anyone ...

Very good stuff. The article about the mechanism in a BLEVE is about the best explanation I have read. And brings to the front something that I was unclear about. That the phenomenon is not restricted to flammable liquids. It would seem that if we keep our boilers at safe water levels, hydro test at...

We are sooo lucky to have decent feed water on both our condensing and non-condensing boats. I have personally seen a 700,000 pound locomotive in the U.S. midwest do a blow down after a 300 mile run using local water. Really hard stuff. The steam column exiting the side of the firebox was clearly br...

Nice reference. Thanks, Ken. Lots of solid information in that article but also some howlers. The business about being able to heat the water beyond the boiling point until there is a disturbance is real but has no relevance to practical boiler operation. To make that happen, the water has to be ver...

Thanks, Fred. I thought so. But I was ready for something new. I spent much of my life trying to get more and more power out of small internal combustion engines and the more I learned, the more of my most cherished theories turned out to be based on received dogma. As a typical example: After modif...