• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

'Hula' Engine.

Peri

Peri

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Steve.
This is my take on the compressed air engine design by Philip Duclos, published in the book 'Steam & Stirling Engines You Can Build Vol2 (1994).

original.jpg

The original plans are in Imperial - to me that's OK for woodwork, but for precision my mind works in metric :)

First, I built the model in Inventor, tweaking the measurements to give 'nice' decimal numbers, and replacing screws and bolts with the nearest metric equivalent.
inventor.jpg

Did a simulated run to see if it looked like it would actually work and not bottom out somewhere.
[youtubessl]aa3VcRBzlTg[/youtubessl]

Then make drawings for each part.
drawing.jpg

Everything was made from scrap bar or square stock.

I still have to dismantle it to give it all a good polish, but it's practically finished, all that's left to do is tap the air inlet valve to M5 and attach a permanent air line fixing.

It turns fairly freely by hand - tbh I was very surprised !

w2.jpg

w3.jpg

w4.jpg

w1.jpg

And finally, just because I had the computer model, a nice render :)

Hula-Engine4.18-web.jpg
 
My goodness, that's stunning. Now, it's fine to test using compressed air, but I DEMAND that you run this on steam!! :)
 
Well that is very delightful.

We need a video of it running once its all hooked up. Perhaps on a repeating gif as im positive that watching that crank spin will be a wonderful hypnotic sight.
 
Well woodwork it ain’t but who cares. Thanks for sharing. Defo need a video. I guess it doesn't make much noise.

Do you plan to hook it up to something?
 
Thank you :)

The original article does suggest running it on steam - to be honest I wouldn't have a clue where to even start with that !

Once it's got an airline attached I'll be sure to do a video, although I'm expecting to have to bolt it to the table !
 
Sorry Andy - I just saw the 'Projects' heading and thought 'That'll do' ! :)

It'll be given a blast of air to see if it really does run, then a final polish before being put into the display case that people have to pass on their way to our engineering classrooms.
 
Fascinating :)

You must have quite a machine shop to go with the obvious engineering and CAD skills.
 
I just realised you can't really tell the scale of it. The base is 4" across and the cylinder socket screws are M2.5 (3-48 UNC)

Rob, I've been working in the engineering department of a college for the last 5 years - before that I'd never done any metal work at all. At 45 I taught myself CAD, then went to college to get some paperwork to prove I could do it, and ended up doing some voluntary teaching. As a 'thank you' the college paid for me to do my basic teaching qualification, and after 6 months or so took me on as part of the staff.

Ian - I'm now looking for a new project, if you've got any drawings......... :text-lol:
 
Peri":1wslj4sf said:
The original article does suggest running it on steam - to be honest I wouldn't have a clue where to even start
Click to expand...
Peri":1wslj4sf said:
Ian - I'm now looking for a new project, if you've got any drawings......... :text-lol:
Click to expand...

I think you have answered your own question. Must be plenty of resources out there for model steam engines.

Whatever you do please don’t hesitate to post details here.
 
Stunning! I haven’t a clue what one would be used for, and in the example of model aeroplanes I can’t think where the compressed air source would come from when it’s up in the air, but regardless, stunning!

Can’t wait to see the video.
 
Considering it weighs well over 2.5kg (5-6 ilbs) you'd need a lot of balsa wood to keep it airborne !
 
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