[Jerry McColgan]

I had not seen or talked to Dave Hottmann for some time so I contacted Dave and he agreed it was time for us to boil some water.

Naturally I had to bring my Aristo-Craft Live Steam Mikado since it gets so little use.

While looking over the Mikado Dave got to thinking about feeding steam into the tender to heat the butane.

To make a long story short, Dave's mind and hands went to work and before long my Mikado was spouting a brand new fuel heating system fed by the loco's water drain.

Anyway, it works great and we ran the Mikado without ever needing to add hot water to the tender.

I'll leave it to Dave to fill in the details and I'll post some photos later.

When I asked, Dave said that he would be willing to do the modification for others for $20 per hour. I think it is a bargain.

Many thanks Dave,

Jerry

 

[Jerry Barnes]

Charles Bednarik did the same for me, works great! Jerry

 

[Steve S.]

Hey Jerry, glad to see that you boiled some water again.

 

[Jerry McColgan]

Hi Steve,

I think I discovered that running live steam requires an extra ingredient that is left out of the instruction manuals.

In addition to water, oil, fuel and fire...

Perhaps the MOST important ingredient is having a good friend who is interested in sharing the experience.

If I had not been going to Dave's I would have stayed home and ran my track powered trains instead.

The extra effort it takes to run a live steamer is (for me anyway) much easier to become enthusiastic about when the loco is secondary to visiting a friend.

After thinking about it I realized that I have only once ever run the loco by myself and that was mainly to confirm that the fire at Diamondhead had done no damage to the loco.

Regards,

Jerry

 

[Dave Hottmann]

Greetings Ya'll,

On Jerry's engine I soldered K&S tubing to the blow down valve, then added a short piece of 1/4" flat stock for a handle. The K&S tubing was fitted with 1/16 ID silicone hose which went into the water fill hole in the fuel tank. On the first run everything was going great, THEN we lost fire. I'm guessing that the heated fuel was too much for the fuel pressure regulator, which quit all together. I ended up gutting the regulator and all was well.

 

[Charles]

Dave
We found that the necessary supply of steam to heat the fuel tank to be at a low setting as you and we have discovered through trial and error. We also experimented with "waterless" warming of a fuel tank having insulated the tender and running a steam line under the fuel tank to warm it.
That works well also.

 

[lvst4evr]

Dave; I gutted the pressure regulator, also, on my aristo mike & thats when my big increase in the volume of fuel going to the burner started! I've now retapped my original jet holder for the 1BA jets I got from Sulphur Springs & am experimenting with different sizes to cut that huge volume of gas down to a minimum. Didnt you experience that when you by-passed Jerry's regulator? Jim Spanier

 

[Charles]

Jim
Found that the control valve on the Aristo gas tank is all or nothing.

 

[Jerry Barnes]

Charles,
Can you make a new valve that would work better? Jerry

 

[Dave Hottmann]

I found that the fuel control valve to be a little touchy. On many of my Accucraft engines I have re-tapered the needles to twice the angle (or half depending on how you look at it, aka "more pointy"). This is something that I would pursue if Jerry's engine was mine. One has to becareful when doing this. Removing too much metal can make it so the valve won't close before the threads bottom out.

 

[Jerry McColgan]

I ran the Mikado again today and found that the fuel valve was touchy but I was able to manage it and find a setting that kept pressure at 30 psi without boiler overpressure.

To play it safe I filled the fuel heater tank with room (car) temperature water and then fed the hot water/steam into the pre-filled water tank using the blow down hot water/steam to give a burst of heat into the water.

The water tank never got hot and I never lost steam pressure in the loco.

It will now probably sit in its box until fall/winter unless I make another trip up to Evening Shade (Dave's place looks and feels like what you would expect to find in a place called "Evening Shade").

Jerry