Meriam Abbott Build

[Richard Hed]

The piston for this engine is made of cast iron, as are the rings. I don't recall making a cast iron piston before, but I really liked it.
Aluminum pistons feel soft and scratchable, this much less so.


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The wrist pin is drill rod with brass end plugs. Rings are cast iron and are the same as the rings for the Nash.
They are 1.000 OD, .920 ID and .045 thick
I made some extras and had a friend with a little oven heat treat them. The fixture is as Trimble described it.
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Some of these rings were spares I made for the Nash. I made oil rings for that one, those are the ones with the holes.
Carburetor is next.
Thanks for looking.

Doug

Yes, aluminum is very sticky and grabby. You can't reliably make an alum cylinder than use an alum piston. Too sticky. I have students which are making a simple wobbler, we are using brass for the cylinder but most of the rest is alum.

 

[Sprocket]

The carburetor in the plans is only described as a "3 mm Carburetor" and appears to be a purchased part. I find carburetors to be a challenge, but kind of fun to make. For this one, I chose a version of Chuck Fellows simple carburetor, as redrawn by Andy Wakefield (awake). The plans are in the download section of the forum. This style allows some throttling, but if you want the VROOM VROOM version, this isn't it.

As always, you have to modify things to suit your purpose. I extended the intake side and threaded it to accept a bug catcher (not really an air cleaner but keeps out the big stuff) and a mounting pad to fit the cylinder head. It needed the extra length between the mount and the body to get a mounting bolt in. The open hole in this picture (above) will take the spray bar, the screw on the side is the throttle. It just intrudes into the passage to limit airflow,


The air screen is just two caps with a shallow rim, one side threaded to match the carb. There are 4 spacers between and 4 bolts on each side. Probably fairly useless, but I like the way it looks.


Water pump is the next part.
Thanks for looking.
Doug

 

[Sprocket]

This is the second water pump I've built. The first was a vane type, so I made this one a gear pump. While I was cutting the gears for this engine, I made a piece of brass gear a little over an inch long and sliced off pieces for these gears. There were no plans, except for sketches on graph paper.

Front cover. The boss will be for bearing the end of the drive gear's shaft.

Pump body with the gear cavity and bearing bored. It still needs room for the lip seal. The second gear is centered on the other hole.

Inside and outside of the cover

Bearing bosses on the back of the pump body

The inside of the pump body. The lip seal cavity is done. After some external shaping, I hope it looks like an old water pump.

Some things I could have changed: If the bottom gear had been the drive gear, the flow would have been reversed and the piping would have been easier. I was assuming the engine rotated clockwise from the non-gear side. Maybe it could run the other way if you set it up that way. I added the boss for the lower shaft to the front plate. It could have been made like the top boss was. There is an oiler on the shaft that isn't on in these pictures.
I don't expect it is terribly efficient, but it circulates enough coolant to cool the engine.
Thanks for looking,
Doug