3" Scale Marshall Traction Engine
Discussion
Hopefully over the winter some more updates will be forthcoming as the engine receives some plumbing work, the garden trolley is transformed into a bespoke coal/water/tools + passenger trailer, and the road transport trailer has one or two minor improvements 
EDIT - I'm disappointed to see this has been moved to the "Scale models" section
Mods, whilst I understand your logic, I must point out that this is a fully functioning, directly driver-controlled and perfectly road legal vehicle - just slightly shrunk. It is not a static diecast model, nor a remote-controlled lookalike. I therefore find your decision to move it from "Readers Cars" slightly akin to filing a thread about monkey bikes or microcars under "Scale models".
Please please could I have it moved back?
EDIT - I'm disappointed to see this has been moved to the "Scale models" section
Mods, whilst I understand your logic, I must point out that this is a fully functioning, directly driver-controlled and perfectly road legal vehicle - just slightly shrunk. It is not a static diecast model, nor a remote-controlled lookalike. I therefore find your decision to move it from "Readers Cars" slightly akin to filing a thread about monkey bikes or microcars under "Scale models".Please please could I have it moved back?
Edited by mat777 on Monday 17th September 02:25
Maybe pointing out the obvious, but Jay Leno is a steamhead and a grease monkey like most of us. He has a couple of team cars. He has some very nice vids, especially the restauration blog. Maybe you'll find it to your liking?
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/categories/res...
PS: His Lotus Elan 26R blog is rather fun as well...
PPS: I fully support OP that this thread should go back to 'readers cars'for all the reasons mentioned by OP. You can legally drive it on the road!!!
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/categories/res...
PS: His Lotus Elan 26R blog is rather fun as well...
PPS: I fully support OP that this thread should go back to 'readers cars'for all the reasons mentioned by OP. You can legally drive it on the road!!!
Edited by Erwin1978 on Monday 17th September 09:20
Great thread, I've always loved seeing these at shows pulling trailers you think they shouldn't be able to.
It's in the right place I think.
Erwin1978 said:
PPS: I fully support OP that this thread should go back to 'readers cars'for all the reasons mentioned by OP. You can legally drive it on the road!!!
It may be road legal and stuff but the fact is it's a (working) scale model of a traction engine. It was probably built for fun (or showing off) and not to lay new roads. It's in the right place I think.
mat777 said:
EDIT - I'm disappointed to see this has been moved to the "Scale models" section Mods, whilst I understand your logic, I must point out that this is a fully functioning, directly driver-controlled and perfectly road legal vehicle - just slightly shrunk. It is not a static diecast model, nor a remote-controlled lookalike. I therefore find your decision to move it from "Readers Cars" slightly akin to filing a thread about monkey bikes or microcars under "Scale models".
Please please could I have it moved back?
Bump - in the hope a Mod see this request to move it back Mods, whilst I understand your logic, I must point out that this is a fully functioning, directly driver-controlled and perfectly road legal vehicle - just slightly shrunk. It is not a static diecast model, nor a remote-controlled lookalike. I therefore find your decision to move it from "Readers Cars" slightly akin to filing a thread about monkey bikes or microcars under "Scale models".Please please could I have it moved back?
Edited by mat777 on Monday 17th September 02:25
You're lucky at 300kg! My Dad's 3" Fowler Ploughing Engine weighs half a ton. And is 64 turns of the steering wheel from lock to lock. And, being a ploughing engine, is very low geared, so uses an inordinate amount of water to go anywhere. Indeed, so much that we don't bother with parades any more, as our local event involves nearly a third of a mile from the holding area to the ring, around the ring and back, which needs the best part of 15kg of coal and 50 litres of water. You road jockeys have it easy!
Erwin1978 said:
Maybe pointing out the obvious, but Jay Leno is a steamhead and a grease monkey like most of us. He has a couple of team cars. He has some very nice vids, especially the restauration blog. Maybe you'll find it to your liking?
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/categories/res...
Great link there Erwin, interesting viewing! he's got a few quite nice steam stationary engines there too!http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/categories/res...
Erwin1978 said:
PPS: I fully support OP that this thread should go back to 'readers cars'for all the reasons mentioned by OP. You can legally drive it on the road!!!
swanny71 said:
Bump - in the hope a Mod see this request to move it back
Thanks for the support guys! mrmaggit said:
You're lucky at 300kg! My Dad's 3" Fowler Ploughing Engine weighs half a ton. And is 64 turns of the steering wheel from lock to lock. And, being a ploughing engine, is very low geared, so uses an inordinate amount of water to go anywhere. Indeed, so much that we don't bother with parades any more, as our local event involves nearly a third of a mile from the holding area to the ring, around the ring and back, which needs the best part of 15kg of coal and 50 litres of water. You road jockeys have it easy!
I'd have very much liked a 2" BB1 (which would still have probably been bigger and heavier than a 3" Marshall!) for ploughing demos but the pitfalls you mention are all too prevalent - and apply pretty well to rollers was well (I'd have loved to have helped roll the grass and compact down driveway repairs with a 3" Aveling&Porter 10-ton 
). You could always have a higher ratio set of gears cut for the second speed (I'm assuming it's a 2-speed compound?) for rally fields but I appreciate that would be quite expensive. A friend of mine with a full-size Robey roller is considering an external 3rd gear for 15mph on the road, a mod which apparently works quite well on a couple of engines belonging to the Robey Trust... not sure I'd want to do 15mph on rolls with no rubbering though!Your Fowler sounds a very impressive beast though, have you got any pics you could post up?
PS. My Marshall is just a lowly agricultural engine that sports a set of rubbers for comfort... a proper road jockey has 3 speeds/4 shafts and a compound cylinder
Matt,
Great write up and a fantastic thread. Many happy memories of walking around the Town & County show fascinated by these beasts, both the full size and the scaled down versions.
Your call and your thread but I would say that it fits in well here. I certainly would not have found it on Readers Cars!
Great write up and a fantastic thread. Many happy memories of walking around the Town & County show fascinated by these beasts, both the full size and the scaled down versions.
Your call and your thread but I would say that it fits in well here. I certainly would not have found it on Readers Cars!
Well, a year down the line and things are still going well. I havent attended as many rallies this year due to a combination of too many other commitments, and some of the shows booking up much quicker than normal. As a result, I have been doing the smaller shows and local village events rather than the big steam rallies but still had a great time (and it frees me up to spectate and chat at the main shows! )
Over the course of the year, there have been a few maladies, repairs and planned upgrades which I'm sure you'll be interested to hear about!
Given the sheer heat this summer, the first casualty was the rubber tyre bands on the wheels. These are an accessory that very few engines (except some late road locomotives) were ever built with in period. Normally, engines relied on metal wheels with strakes welded to them. Great for grip in fields and on grass, and for the old style roads at the turn of the century. Not so good for grip (or comfort!) on the newly emerging macadam roads. These days, pretty much every full size engine you see will have been retrofitted with rubber cushion tyres - either by countersink-bolting them to the wheel (the quick and cheap way) or by vulcanising the rubber onto the rim (very expensive but gives great results).
At scale miniature level, the choice is usually between vulcanising or some sort of strong glue. Mine were held on with liquid rubber cement and, well, it came unstuck in the heat:
As much as I would have liked to vulcanised them back on, it would have been approaching £250 per wheel and the process also destroys all surface finishings on the wheels (normally one vulcanises then paints them). Time for plan B then - some more glue, only stronger!
Enter a tube of:
This stuff is like bitumen in a tube, and sets to a hard yet flexible cross between epoxy resin and tar. it sticks anything to everything, but if you get it on something unintentionally it will NOT come off! (ask me how I know)
Anyway, first job was to remove each wheel in turn to prepare it - a blowtorch and scraper to remove the remnants of the old glue, followed by a wipe-round with a petrol soaked rag to leave it totally clean
The glue was then applied and the rubber loop levered over the wheel into place, before a ratchet strap was tightened around the wheel to secure it in place and left to set. Whilst the wheel was off, I took the opportunity to clean up the friction faces of the brake band:
The brake is typically Victorian in design - an ingeniously simple idea, executed in a a way involving complicated mechanisms! Shown above in its disconnected state (so I could get the wheel off), normally the bottom of the band of blocks is attached to the silver bar dangling under the black pivot. When the screw handle level with the top of the tender is turned, the vertical silver rod is pulled up, forcing the opposite end of the black pivoting bar down. This causes the band of wooden blocks to constrict around a machined surface on the inside of the wheel.
If you're wondering, the 4 machined slots in the hub are for the drive pins - more of which in a sec.
Block faces sanded back to clean wood, the wheel was popped back on and left to set whilst we got on with the other side:
I just had one more job .... to reattach the axle end cover. This took almost as long as the rest of the job! Persuading four 5mm long x 2 mm wide bolts back into their holes was a mite fiddly for adult fingers, but the finally bit into their holes in the wheel centre. Slight problem - it was on the wrong bloody way round! its almost impossible to see with the naked eye, but part of the cap has a tiny flat filed in the circumference to enable the driving pin to go into its hole:
So what's the point of this driving pin? Well, as you may have noticed in the wheels-off photo, there is nothing to transfer motion of the axle to motion of the wheel. It simply slides onto the axle with a huge split-pin arrangement to stop it falling off the end. To provide drive, the big square driving pin goes through a keyway in the wheel centre and slots into one of the 4 slots in the hub, acting like a woodruff key to transmit the drive as a shear force in the pin. The hub is connected to the axle which is connected via many gears to the crankshaft. This particular engine does not have a differential, so it only has a driving pin in one wheel. Should I encounter a low-traction situation (wet rally field), then I can insert a pin in the other rear wheel to get 2 wheel drive with a resultant reluctance for it to turn corners!
Some of the more complex engines, mainly those designed for road use (it must be remembered that mine is an agricultural engine designed for farm use), have a proper differential in the gear pit above the axle. In these cases, driving pins are left in both wheels and a third pin is used to lock the diff when the going gets slippery.
You may also have noticed in the wheels-off photo, that there is a set of rollers mounted to the back corner of the tender. Looking more closely, you might notice that the hub on that side has a reel of cable wound around it. This is the winch, a vital piece of equipment for an agricultural engine that could be called on to drag all manner of things from moving felled trees to recovering stuck machinery. With the cable unwound and passed through the rollers, the drive pin is pulled out of the wheel so only the hub will turn, and drive to the axle is engaged in the normal way up on the footplate. Given the awesome towing power of a traction engine, you'd suspect that the winches are also ridiculously powerful - and you'd be right! Sadly I'eve never tried using mine, but the full-size boys often have call to use theirs if it rains hard at a rally and all the HGVs, road-rubbered steam engines etc start getting stuck. Normal practice is to use a chain-gang of tractors to drag one engine across the mire where it can then sit and winch everything else across!
Back to the tyre troubles - having taken the drive pin-fouling end cover off again, and fought to get it back on again the right way round, the pin went back in and the job was a good'un!
Slight problem however.... starting on the other rear wheel, the cover would not come off for love nor money! With all 4 of its tiny bolts out and a selection of equally tiny screwdrivers trying to lever it off, the damn thing wouldnt budge. So, this tyre was going to have to be done in situ, much to my annoyance - particularly as this was an inside edge tyre, not an outside one like the last wheel so it couldnt just be slipped on as a hoop. The rubber band was cut and fed around the wheel before the same process of strapping and leaving to set. Because we didnt have the wheel on the workbend to do this, it was hard to get it to sit right and I am somewhat less impressed with the final result, with the tyre being slightly wavy rather than dead-straight as on the first wheel. But oh well, thanks to the tiger seal its not like I can now get it off to try again!
Well, thats it for tonight I'm afraid as its 2am and I'm rather tired! Stay tuned though for a missive on the gears, and a build log of my lovely new period-look scale riding trailer
)Over the course of the year, there have been a few maladies, repairs and planned upgrades which I'm sure you'll be interested to hear about!
Given the sheer heat this summer, the first casualty was the rubber tyre bands on the wheels. These are an accessory that very few engines (except some late road locomotives) were ever built with in period. Normally, engines relied on metal wheels with strakes welded to them. Great for grip in fields and on grass, and for the old style roads at the turn of the century. Not so good for grip (or comfort!) on the newly emerging macadam roads. These days, pretty much every full size engine you see will have been retrofitted with rubber cushion tyres - either by countersink-bolting them to the wheel (the quick and cheap way) or by vulcanising the rubber onto the rim (very expensive but gives great results).
At scale miniature level, the choice is usually between vulcanising or some sort of strong glue. Mine were held on with liquid rubber cement and, well, it came unstuck in the heat:
As much as I would have liked to vulcanised them back on, it would have been approaching £250 per wheel and the process also destroys all surface finishings on the wheels (normally one vulcanises then paints them). Time for plan B then - some more glue, only stronger!
Enter a tube of:
This stuff is like bitumen in a tube, and sets to a hard yet flexible cross between epoxy resin and tar. it sticks anything to everything, but if you get it on something unintentionally it will NOT come off! (ask me how I know)
Anyway, first job was to remove each wheel in turn to prepare it - a blowtorch and scraper to remove the remnants of the old glue, followed by a wipe-round with a petrol soaked rag to leave it totally clean
The glue was then applied and the rubber loop levered over the wheel into place, before a ratchet strap was tightened around the wheel to secure it in place and left to set. Whilst the wheel was off, I took the opportunity to clean up the friction faces of the brake band:
The brake is typically Victorian in design - an ingeniously simple idea, executed in a a way involving complicated mechanisms! Shown above in its disconnected state (so I could get the wheel off), normally the bottom of the band of blocks is attached to the silver bar dangling under the black pivot. When the screw handle level with the top of the tender is turned, the vertical silver rod is pulled up, forcing the opposite end of the black pivoting bar down. This causes the band of wooden blocks to constrict around a machined surface on the inside of the wheel.
If you're wondering, the 4 machined slots in the hub are for the drive pins - more of which in a sec.
Block faces sanded back to clean wood, the wheel was popped back on and left to set whilst we got on with the other side:
I just had one more job .... to reattach the axle end cover. This took almost as long as the rest of the job! Persuading four 5mm long x 2 mm wide bolts back into their holes was a mite fiddly for adult fingers, but the finally bit into their holes in the wheel centre. Slight problem - it was on the wrong bloody way round! its almost impossible to see with the naked eye, but part of the cap has a tiny flat filed in the circumference to enable the driving pin to go into its hole:
So what's the point of this driving pin? Well, as you may have noticed in the wheels-off photo, there is nothing to transfer motion of the axle to motion of the wheel. It simply slides onto the axle with a huge split-pin arrangement to stop it falling off the end. To provide drive, the big square driving pin goes through a keyway in the wheel centre and slots into one of the 4 slots in the hub, acting like a woodruff key to transmit the drive as a shear force in the pin. The hub is connected to the axle which is connected via many gears to the crankshaft. This particular engine does not have a differential, so it only has a driving pin in one wheel. Should I encounter a low-traction situation (wet rally field), then I can insert a pin in the other rear wheel to get 2 wheel drive with a resultant reluctance for it to turn corners!
Some of the more complex engines, mainly those designed for road use (it must be remembered that mine is an agricultural engine designed for farm use), have a proper differential in the gear pit above the axle. In these cases, driving pins are left in both wheels and a third pin is used to lock the diff when the going gets slippery.
You may also have noticed in the wheels-off photo, that there is a set of rollers mounted to the back corner of the tender. Looking more closely, you might notice that the hub on that side has a reel of cable wound around it. This is the winch, a vital piece of equipment for an agricultural engine that could be called on to drag all manner of things from moving felled trees to recovering stuck machinery. With the cable unwound and passed through the rollers, the drive pin is pulled out of the wheel so only the hub will turn, and drive to the axle is engaged in the normal way up on the footplate. Given the awesome towing power of a traction engine, you'd suspect that the winches are also ridiculously powerful - and you'd be right! Sadly I'eve never tried using mine, but the full-size boys often have call to use theirs if it rains hard at a rally and all the HGVs, road-rubbered steam engines etc start getting stuck. Normal practice is to use a chain-gang of tractors to drag one engine across the mire where it can then sit and winch everything else across!
Back to the tyre troubles - having taken the drive pin-fouling end cover off again, and fought to get it back on again the right way round, the pin went back in and the job was a good'un!
Slight problem however.... starting on the other rear wheel, the cover would not come off for love nor money! With all 4 of its tiny bolts out and a selection of equally tiny screwdrivers trying to lever it off, the damn thing wouldnt budge. So, this tyre was going to have to be done in situ, much to my annoyance - particularly as this was an inside edge tyre, not an outside one like the last wheel so it couldnt just be slipped on as a hoop. The rubber band was cut and fed around the wheel before the same process of strapping and leaving to set. Because we didnt have the wheel on the workbend to do this, it was hard to get it to sit right and I am somewhat less impressed with the final result, with the tyre being slightly wavy rather than dead-straight as on the first wheel. But oh well, thanks to the tiger seal its not like I can now get it off to try again!
Well, thats it for tonight I'm afraid as its 2am and I'm rather tired! Stay tuned though for a missive on the gears, and a build log of my lovely new period-look scale riding trailer
Athlon said:
Were you one of the two guys at Event City a couple of weeks ago?
Sadly not, it sounds like an interesting get together though! I will research it and see if I can attendit next year.Edited by airbrakes on Sunday 11th August 02:35
Some Caterham owners use windscreen bonding agents (like Tiger seal) to stick their front cycle wings on. If the wings themselves were strong enough, you could pick up the car with them.
I used to get mine from the local windscreen place - a tube was about 7 quid. Stick it in a bowl of hot water for 15 mins prior to use and it "pumps" a bit easier.
When dry, I'd say it felt similar to tyre rubber - perfect for your application.
Love this thread. Keep it going please.
I used to get mine from the local windscreen place - a tube was about 7 quid. Stick it in a bowl of hot water for 15 mins prior to use and it "pumps" a bit easier.
When dry, I'd say it felt similar to tyre rubber - perfect for your application.
Love this thread. Keep it going please.
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