I'm a light shade of green with envy. I bought an 18 x 24 recently but it has the usual large blade area typical of Michigan power boat wheels. Mine was rather poorly packed in a cardboard box and one blade was peering out. The truck driver was concerned about damage. I laughed and deliberately drop...

See, John? Lots of good ideas on here. Probably more good experience available here that anywhere else. That said, I dunno about having the manual and engine driven pumps in series. The advantages are as claimed. But it would seem as though you would loose a lot of redundancy. There are a number of ...

Looking back at my post, I realize that I left something out. Not a first for me (ahem). A little background: My steam experience has been strongly biased towards non-condensing installations. In my case, railroad locomotives. The one I did the most work on was a 90 ton Shay geared locomotive. The w...

Perhaps you should consider having a hotwell. The reason being that it is very convenient to have a simple system of automatic boiler water level control. That simple way is to have a hot well with a float valve. The float valves I have seen over the years do not lend themselves to any installation ...

My lowly donkey boiler is looking better and better to me.
Mike

My only personal experience of one was a small copper unit for a model locomotive, 1.5" to the foot. I never did get it leak free as it was designed to be brazed up all at once and after about the third tank of gas and after singeing myself several times, it was set aside for a calmer day. I have be...

One notices that Wes is very careful to NOT include any pictures of his sister. Should he do so, I would predict a sudden increase in interest from of younger steam enthusiasts. Cough, cough.

I think Jon's question is, "Why would the condensation flow down the small pipe when it doesn't seem to flow back to the boiler via the whistle supply pipe?" The answer being a two fold one. One, there is a constant, if small, flow to atmospheric pressure through the small line whereas unless you ar...

The trick I use to mix up epoxy with a filler the way Fred recommends is to keep adding filler a bit at a time until it will hang on your mixing stick like mayonnaise rather than like peanut butter. No oozing off however slowly. The technical term for this state is Thixotropic. This is covered in th...

Perhaps this whistle valve return line could do double duty as the supply line for a Windermere Kettle. Heat your hot toddy and keep both whistles going!! It hot and yours wet.