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You will need to message George directly to purchase a plan set. As far as I know they are not for sale on any website.

There is a (fairly) simple formula based on the change in temperature and the coefficient of thermal expansion for the material (which changes depending on the material). Until you get close to melting point, the relationship holds so 400 will expand more than 300. I did the sums based on 350 F...

Sorry, I mean 2 to 4 seconds once it contacts the steel. You do want to be as quick as you can once you get it out of the oven but it gets critical once the two parts come together. For the dirtbike cases I would heat the case to around 150 C (no hotter because the crank seals couldn't handle...

If your aluminium part doesn't have any other material on it (seals, bearings, etc.) then you can get it as hot as you like, short of it becoming plastic or melting. No reason not to get it up as hot as your oven will go. But if it's thin then the aluminium will cool very quickly when exposed to...

Wow - the boat, the boiler and the engine are just beautiful. I'm an I.C. guy but you've almost convinced me I need to have a go at a steam setup some day.

Heavyside himself considered that it should be called Maxwell's theory and said as much in the first volume of his Electromagnetic Theory books. And Oliver Heavyside is reasonably well known in mathematics with at least a few theorems and functions named after him. For a self-taught guy he did...

Looks good so far! I have to comment on the ruler though - I had exactly the same ruler in high school and we decided to test the 'shatterproof' claim. It tool an incredible amount of bending but when it did finally let go it shattered in spectacular fashion. Shatter-resistant would be a better...

It's the other way round I believe - your accuracy is +/- 1/2 the smallest division of your equipment. Let's say you're measuring centimetres with a metre rule with only whole centimetres marked. You measure something that looks to be somewhere between 66 and 67. You can definitely see it's...

Well, you wanted some critique so I can provide a start. Not true - even if the cylinder dropped to atmospheric at BDC the pressure developed by compression could be very high, depending on the compression ratio of the cylinder. I know we don't normally consider a compression ratio for a steam...

Nice job. I have the plans for this engine and I hope when I get around to building it it comes out half as nice as yours.

As has been said, the math here is slightly mixed up. Using Bill's sketch, we do indeed want to find the dimension of 'a' and as it stands we know angle 'B' (41 degrees being 1/2 82 degrees) and side 'b' at 0.1125". Bill is also correct that we need to use tan(B), which is ~0.869. However...

I'm not sure about this method. Exhaust tuning can have a lot of impact on power production so changing the exhaust so much by removing the manifolds might make a lot of difference to power output and might not show the true effect of the middle cylinder. I'm certainly curious about how much...

That is a beautiful engine. Nice job. Do you have a video of it running by any chance?

Is this the cheap Hare and Forbes one? I've been thinking about trying one out but, like you, figured it would be crappy.

Welcome to the forum. Sure you can ask questions about your build. The best place to post a thread would be in the 'General Engine Discussion' sub-forum which can be found in the 'Building Them' section. LINK

Congrats on the build. A bit of tuning and I'm sure it'll run beautifully.

An hour in the toaster sounds about right but I would have left the part in the freezer at least 8-12 hours to get it properly cold. Sounds like you've got it sorted now anyway but something to consider if you need to do similar in the future.

The gas produced should only be hydrogen. When we had to strip a large mis-galvanised piece the violent bubbling of the pickle solution would foam up and cause the tanks to overflow. To prevent this we 'flared' them by tossing in a lit piece of paper. It was very satisfying to watch a 50 foot x...

I use a gold plating solution that contains a cyanide salt. Using appropriate PPE and proper safety precautions it hasn't caused me any issues. We play with a lot of potentially harmful substances (especially molten metals) and cyanide is just another thing to be careful of. Edit to add: I used...

Welcome to the forum Minh - this is an English language forum so please post in English here, even if it is just Google translated. Google translated - Chào mừng bạn đến với diễn đàn Minh - đây là một diễn đàn tiếng Anh, vì vậy vui lòng đăng bằng tiếng Anh tại đây, ngay cả khi đó chỉ là...