Alaska's tiny engine room

A special section just for steam engines and boilers, as without these you may as well fit a sail.
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Akitene
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Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by Akitene » Thu Aug 24, 2017 2:22 pm

Found this video of Thames steamer Alaska tiny engine room:

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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by DetroiTug » Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:39 pm

Great video! What are those pellets? Never seen anything like that for fuel.

-Ron
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by swedtug » Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:25 pm

Yes great video, realy tiny Engine room :shock: mine is bigger :D

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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by TahoeSteam » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:19 pm

Ron, the pellets are compressed sawdust. Kinda like presto logs.
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by cyberbadger » Fri Aug 25, 2017 6:03 pm

Very cool.

The engineer looks like they shut him away too much in the engine room. ;)

I was looking online. So there are straight hardwood compressed sawdust logs, but also the same plus wax - wax logs, and you can also get compressed peat logs.

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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by Lopez Mike » Sat Aug 26, 2017 12:51 am

The main problem for me with any alternative fuel is supply. As soon as I put my boat on the trailer (where it spends much of its time) the issue rears its head.

As long as I am either steaming out of my home harbor or only traveling to a single weekend event, I can carry enough ordinary wood to get by. My current trip involves three events and the boat looks like some refugee transport vehicle with bags and boxes of wood stacked up! I have stashes of fuel left along my route like a polar expedition.

If I convert to liquid fuel then no problem except for the water consumption. But the cost of ordinary Prestologs or any purchased wood is a deal breaker.

Coal is not available in this area. At least not decent stuff and the mess turns me off. Propane involves lugging tanks back and forth.

I am doing some low intensity research into the consumption and cost of wood pellets. I think the engineering has been pretty much solved by the steamer in Tasmania (I need to do a search on here and re-read his posts).

My next step in this direction would be to build a pot burner to see if there is any chance of getting pellets to burn cleanly with natural draft. I'm keeping my eye out in thrift stores for a suitable "bean pot" with a lid for experiments. If not, there have been great advances in computer fans.

It will be a wrench to walk away from wood firing with the option of gathering drift wood in the event of a shortage.

I was presented with an alternative recently but the energy yield didn't work out. I took my 92 year old neighbor out for a jaunt and he asked me about what I could burn. I said that if he croaked while steaming with me, in the firebox he would go. His wife thought well of the money she might save on cremation but on reflection I would have to dry and cure him before he would produce much heat.
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by Oilking » Sat Aug 26, 2017 4:35 am

Sounds like "The Cremation Of Sam MaGee".
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by RGSP » Sat Aug 26, 2017 8:25 am

In city areas in the UK the coke-can sized compressed sawdust logs are widely available and used, though very often they're brick sized and shaped, not cylindrical. I would guess that "Alaska" might be burning them because they can be burned as a "smokeless" fuel where such things are mandatory like London. The eco-police don't like waxed ones, but in any case if the compression pressure is enough the wax is almost pointless. They burn well in any grate designed for coal, and a number of steamboat owners use them.

Oddly enough, in country areas where there's lots of "real" firewood, the compressed sawdust briquettes are NOT normally available.

We also have what we know as pellets, but they're much smaller - about 1/2" diameter and long - and delivered by tanker into hoppers for automatic-feed central heating boilers. They got popular in country areas (i.e. no piped gas supply) when the oil price was high. (Some people used straight wood chip in the same way, but it's inclined to jam up). I suppose the automatic feed with small wood pellets could work in steamboats as well, but I've not heard of anyone using it.

Having regularly worked in areas where peat is dug and dried as the standard fuel, it produces a lovely smell, but the heat-per-unit-area is low.

I've also just started using a sort of mini-barbeque, which uses shaped briquettes of compressed coconut husk (imported from South Korea, would you believe?). They seem to be rather good on both ease of lighting and heat output. These also come in the so-called "rapid" form, which are ready to start cooking in a couple of minutes after lighting - the trick being that they're surface-impregnated with sodium nitrate. They might be useful for starting coal or wood steamboat boilers, but they'd be too expensive for general use.
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by Lopez Mike » Sat Aug 26, 2017 1:29 pm

Great poem.

Opening line, "Sam McGee was from Tennessee."
Closing line, "Close the door. You're letting in a draft. I haven't been this warm since I left Tennessee!"

I'll set aside the time right now to find the posts about pellets.
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Re: Alaska's tiny engine room

Post by Lopez Mike » Sat Aug 26, 2017 1:38 pm

Here it is: http://www.thesteamboatingforum.net/for ... ing#p12090

I like his burner pot. I'm not as fond of the feed control device with the rotating disc. Most home pellet stoves use a screw feeder. Maybe his disc setup takes less electrical power.

I'm really wary of a complicated computer based controller. A couple of motors for feed and forced draft with variable resisters and the extra complication of an electrical system to drive it is troubling enough. But those things I can fix with hand tools.

I build controllers like his on a regular basis for customers but I'd rather stay with stuff that I can beat on for my own boat.
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