Steam Engine: Info Please

[zeeprogrammer]

What this points out to me is the need to mark, label, or apply a plaque somewhere to identify you and your model. It's such a shame to think that someone could be holding your engine years from now wondering who made such a piece or where it came from.

Reminds me of some flea markets I used to go to where you came across old albums of photos of people. No idea who they were. I'm sure they never thought their photo would end up in an anonymous pile of photo picked over by strangers.

Mark the engine...not just the base. (Mark the photo...not just the album.) Things get removed or damaged.

 

[shred]

To me the flywheel is a giveaway that it's not a production piece. Could be a scratch model, could be from a kit, could be a one-off, I defer to the more knowledgeable on that, but clearly castings have been used elsewhere and wheel castings of all sorts (fly, hand, road, ... ) were bread-and-butter for foundries back in the day, so there was a reason this doesn't have one. It's possible the original was lost, but to me more likely the builder wanted to make a built-up one; cost, aesthetics, availability, who knows the reason.

Other things are the lack of builder info. Word of mouth was a huge form of advertising back-in-the-day and its rare to see something mass produced from that era that doesn't have at least a maker name and place cast in or on a builder plate somewhere.

 

[arnoldb]

Maybe going way off topic from Roman's original, and second, request, and showing my inexperience.

I had a close look at the flywheel on this engine earlier today; while it appears to have been fabricated, I noticed a band of flash around the outside of the hub between the spokes that indicates at least the hub was cast, yet the spokes appear to be machined. Whoever did the work on this flywheel will have me guessing for a long time; was the hub cast, and then the flywheel spokes added, or was the entire thing cast and then each spoke cleaned up very carefully to get rid of the flash that should have been visible on the spokes?

Regards, Arnold