The Steamboating Forum

Fred, this is the muffler/feedwater heater I built for an early steam carriage I'm restoring.

BEAUTIFUL WORK YOU DO, AS WE HAVE ALL SEEN FOR YEARS ON THIS FORUM.

This is my set up:

https://youtu.be/OC5pHkGR63E

Good for 15 amps in theory, and so far has had more than enough power for anything I have needed!

It directly drives an unmodified 24VDC permanent magnet motor, so I don't have to spin it too fast to get 12V.

Of course it helps that the rated power/speed of the engine is 1/3 bhp @ 2,800rpm on 80psi

Nice Sirius.

I always wondered how close a Stuart Sirius is to the gensets Stuart made for WW2.

I used a Stuart 4a and could get 100Watts out without much trouble with a WindBlue permanent magnet alternator. Load: 12V 100Watt incandescent light bulb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AbbH1R48X0

-CB

Love that Sirius. It's always satisfying to see them used in a way that both takes advanage of their quirks and is useful.

I have the drawings for the Firefly gen set and it is the Sirius. No differences that I can see. It supplied 6V at around 4A to charge a small lead acid battery that powered a small morse code radio set for clandestine service. The boiler was an ordinary pressure cooker doubled in height. No condensing or feed water pump. Just batch operation fired with wood. The boxed gen set was shipped inside the boiler for air dropping.

I'm a ham operator with a special interest in WW2 clandestine and tactical radios. Now the radios are so efficient that we just carry batteries with us. Very much the same as back then though. Perhaps up to a five watt radio using a wire thrown over a bush.

The Sirius seems to run quite reliably though a close look at the bevel gears supplied to drive the valve gear would indicate that the loads are modest.

I saw one driving a model Merry Go Round (Carousel, Hurdy Gurdy) in pretty much continuous duty. Hours a day. The maintenance guy said that all he did was drain and refill the crank case once a day to flush out condensate that got past the rings.

The model was said to be of a English or European on as it turned clockwise. Stateside ones being asserted to go the other way. I’ve seen full sized ones go both ways.

I was 13 and didn’t know enough to ask much more. 78 now. Groan!

Mike