Fabrication of the cylinders and valves, part III
To give you an idea of the construction of the cylinders, I made a quick (very quick!) sketch of how they're built up. In fact, I have not made any formal drawings at all - I'm "ad-libbing" everything, planning as I go. Occasionally I make a sketch like this one to ensure that I haven't made any gross errors in planning...
The main parts of the cylinder assembly are:
- The valve "liner" (actually, it's not a liner at all, but a valve cylinder in its own right),
- the "collars" (with their inspection openings) around the liner,
- the end plates and
- the cylinder tube itself.
The arrows show how the pieces connect. The steam from the boiler enters the "live" tube into the middle of the valve liner, exits the port, goes through the collar and the little round spacer into the end plate and from there to the cylinder. The spent steam goes back the same way, through the collar into the liner, and then exits from the outer end of the liner (which is seated inside the end plate) through the other, rectangular spacer into the exhaust tubing. Note that this tube is off-center, so as not to interfere with the live steam tube.This pretty well simulates the paths that the steam takes in a real, cored casting - which is also quite a convoluted affair!
Now for some photos...
The cylinders are definitely not beautiful! (Yet... ;-)
They'll still need a lot of cleaning, and some more acid pickling to get rid of all the unsightly oxide, for sure! There will of course be a nicely formed wrapper, just the inspection plugs will be seen, not all the jumble inside...
This is how the right-hand cylinder assembly looks from the side of the loco (front to the right).
This is from the top (loco front points left downwards).
This oblique bottom view shows the off-center exhaust pipe (left), and the live steam pipe. Loco front points left-upwards.
Next task will be making the glands and rod guides...
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