Engineering Projects/Steam Engine/Project3

Week0 Preferences

The goal of this project is to make a fully functioning steam(Air Pressure) Engine. My team Adam, Freddy, and myself(Ryan) will finish the project that Adam started and have it ready to present to the board

Week1 Brainstorming Narrative

Our newly assembled team is assessing what the engine is missing and what made it fail in the first place. I was looking at the cap to the cylinder of the engine and found that when the piston rod was pushing out, the rod was creating friction and causing some resistance. I suggested that we use a metal gasket to allow the pipe to move smoothly back and forth. Adam found a rubber gasket that was just as good. I used the hot glue-gun to glue the gasket to the cap to make sure that it didn't move out of place. When I finished gluing the gasket on to the cap there was enough space to stabilize the piston. For the PVC pipe we needed away to properly control the air pressure so I volunteered to get the washers for the air control valve over the weekend.

Week2 Narrative construction

I had acquired a washer, but I only found one of its type in my house. The hole on the washer was too small, so I was going to drill the hole to make it bigger and find some more washers but Adam found longer thick washers to put into the air control valve. But I feel that when we tested out the engine I was noticing that there was too much air pressure escaping. I drilled holes into the air control tube to make due to the fact that the pipe is newer then the last one. When we tested the piston the engine was pushing out the rod, but it was not pushing the rod back into the Cylinder. The team and I added another metal washer to the inside part of the piston to prevent air from escaping and causing the piston to become neutralized. Freddy was working on the flywheel to attach to the piston and I sanded down the wheel to make sure that it its level. I was doing research on train steam engines to make sure we had something similar. We have drilled a wooden block to add to the wheel, but the barrings don't really fit so we are going to have to soak the wood to make it swell and make the barrings stay inside.

The group members present at the time were working on connecting the arm to the flywheel. The wheel was 16 inch's in diamiter and we added an additianal 4 for the arm to connect with the piston head. Next week I will conduct research into the joint used to connect the flywheel to the piston.

Week3 Narrative

I spent time soldering the nuts on to the arm connecting the pipe to the flywheel to make sure that the nuts didn't unscrew from the all-thread when the wheel was in motion.

My partner Freddy and I were doing research on the joint that is used to connect the piston to the flywheel arm; it also turns out that the name of the joint is called a Cross-head

Hand Drawn Crosshead sketch

.At first I was going to try and print out a cross-head, but the 3d printer didn't print properly; so Freddy mad a cross-head out of PVC, nuts, washers, and an all-thread. I began soldering the cross-head to make sure that the nuts didn't come off.

Next week the team and I are going to start mounting the flywheel and the engine.

Week4 Narrative

My team and I have finished the flywheel, the Crosshead, and the piston, so we started to begin work on the mounting. We used a long 2 x 4 as the base for the engine and the flywheel. We used an 11 inch 2 x 4 as a mount to for the wheel. This was block that we had drill weeks before and used 2 baring and a rod. What we did was we drilled a hole into the flywheel so that it can fit on the rod, we also used the two bearing's and hot glued them into the hole that we had drilled into the block previously. To mound the flywheel block we had to drill 3 screws into the bottom of the block to try and prevent the block from wiggling on us.

We scraped the use of the sliders because the piston head, the crosshead, and the flywheel arm were too short, so we kept the item as is. For the mount of the engine its self what we did was we cut 2 board with a Cradel, actually we drilled them into the wood. But in order for the wheel to move without worry of getting the nut hit the mount we placed the engine supports further to the right of the base. We drilled and screwed the blocks to lock into the base.

Piston Engine Part 1

Piston Engine Part2

Our goal was to make a working high pressure engine using base materials, we have worked on building the device and tinkering with it and sharing ideas to make the project moves smoothly as possible and so far we are done.