More Photos and Information about
"LITTLE BUBBA!"
Thank you Frank Delker for the above photo
11/2000 Featured here is Ray Bennett .. Our #1 Train Volunteer, very good friend and idea man. Ray and I cleaned out the boiler tubes after 2 years use .... they were clogged completely shut yet still ran pretty well the last time we ran it .... after cleaning the tubes and the twisty stainless steel strips it now runs better than it ever has .... can go non stop now till we use up all the water in the tender or oil for the rods ... about several hours if we want ... the power is at least 4x more and we can now hold constant steam pressure anywhere we want it as per load we are hauling.
We found that leaving it on pilot only with it's pure orange flame caused all the soot in the first place ..... we now only use the pilot to ignite the main burner and then turn it off. Larry Allen & his dad figured that out for us ... also helped out a lot by removing the old water feed pump and sprocket for us.
I was 10 times dirtier that Ray is shown here ....
Mel Harris (of Harris Locomotive Works) & Ray Bennet on our maiden voyage .... blowing the 3 chime Buckeye whistle! Boy does it sound wonderful!!!! Without these 2 guys we couldn't have done this project!
11/28/98 Today, Ray Bennett & I twisted 5 foot long (the length the 28 fire tubes) stainless steel strips 15/16th's of an inch wide & 24 gauge. We put 3 twists into each strip & placed them into the top 3 rows of fire tubes to slow & spin the flame out against the pipe & heat the water more effeciently - I read about this technic in Live Steam Magazine. We left the 2 bottom rows empty since the flame will be slowed in the upper tubes & be forced through the lower tubes. I want to thank my very good friend, Jim Goff for cutting & donating the strips to our project. Below see a photo of Ray placing one of the strips in a fire tube & some of them already in place. The first 2 pics are of the engine with the new bell on & the funnel smoke stack in place, and the sand dome in place (which I chromed later)
Below you can see a photo of a Hawaii Plantation Engine ... Our engine looks similar .. although ours is not built to any scale. But at least you can see there were small gauge trains with larger cabs ... some scale purists turn their noses up at trains like ours that are not an exact scale copy of a full sized one from the past. Ours is an original .. used our own plans from scratch so is a 1999 working steam locomotive.
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