 Single Cylinder Oscillator
OK I'll start off with a story of my own little engine.
It all started somewhere in the early eighties when I was back at home with my Mum and Dad, between marriages, and my Dad was into car boot sales at the time.
He came home one day with a model boat that contained a little vap boiler and a single cylinder oscillator attached to the prop. Very simple and cheap and I fell in love with it. When I asked my Dad what he paid for it he said something like a couple of pounds. So I asked him if I could have it. "Sure" he says, "I'll let you have it for twenty" He was a Yorkshireman.
So me also being a Yorkshireman told him to stick it! What I did do though was take it apart and see how it worked. Next time back on the ship I made my own in the engine room workshop out of scrap bits I found all over the place.
The main body is made from plumbers brass compression fittings, soldered together and the piston and cylinder is made from a brass weight attached to a steel tape measure and used for sounding fuel tanks. The spring came from a compressor unloader and the flywheel was turned from a former out of an old copper pipe bending kit. All the other bits were turned from bits of scrap.
I had no drawings to work from and the only sketch I made was to determine the throw from the bore and stroke and to work out where to drill the ports.
At the end of the day it works!! I have had it running on compressed air a few times and I have never had any ambitions to put it into anything the whole purpose was simply to show my Dad and say "You won't sell me yours for a fair price so I'll make my own!"
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“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days" |