Josh, As a fellow Wisconsin steamboater who would like a ride on your boat one day (and would be happy to have your company on mine), I'd like to respectfully urge you to consider the possibility that a lot of the concern you are hearing is not the sound of old habits dying hard, but of folks with a...

Thanks for the explanation and video clip. Now I know what my new boiler needs to look like!

Cheers,
Scott

A question to Bart or others on the list who may have experience with this: Can you really use a reciprocating pump on a Lamont boiler? I have read many times that feed water (at atmospheric pressure) starts to get difficult to pump above 180 or so because it may flash to steam on the intake stroke....

I don't have any experience with Beckman's boilers, but I do have a lot of experience with thinking that I will save money on steam projects by building something myself or re-purposing some piece of equipment. What I have found is that unless you have both time and excellent tooling at your disposa...

As all of the water in your boiler will be the same temperature (once you have it boiling under pressure, anyway), the water in your drum will not cool or condense steam that is generated in the tubes. I believe that the only issues to be concerned with regarding tube arrangement is that they need t...

Ron, No worries. I bought my hull in 2004 and am still not finished getting the first engine and boiler running to my satisfaction (or sometimes at all). So there is certainly no hurry. Not sure if this would be of interest to your friend looking for a car boiler, but I was quoted $450 last week to ...

Does anyone know the builder of this boiler? I do not intend to criticize someone else's work, especially when I have not seen it in person, but there are at least two things any potential buyer should check out: 1) The safeties look like they might be air relief valves, not ASME steam relief valves...

I have seen a couple of videos on youtube showing a solenoid valve uniflow steam/air engine. It was very crude, but made an effective demonstration that it worked. The builder just had a magnet on the flywheel and little reed switch. The magnet closed the switch when it came around near it. The reed...

Ron, Is your friend with the twin uniflow accepting orders yet? That engine looks fantastic and I might like to be the first in line for a set of castings. I have been noodling around with a uniflow design of exactly those dimensions for some time, but have not taken the plunge into construction. I'...

There are other triples out there with piston valves on all three cylinders. I bought a 27' tug a couple of years ago that has a 2.5+4+6x4 (approximate) triple with conventional single piston valves on each expansion. No builders identification. However, mine is clearly a small working engine and no...