The Steamboating Forum

Hi

Great to see your progress. For the rudder, why not mount a pair of them on the transom either side of the drive shaft? In my head siling dinghy technology would be fine. Just a couple of 'pins' screwed to the transom for each rudder and then the rudders themselves can just lift off for towing etc. Taking the dinghy tecnology further and having a rudder blade held down by 'elastic' could be useful in shallow waters.

Sorry to hear that you still have frost over night. Here in Cymru we have had a long run of dry, sunny days and warmish nights. Yesterday reached 20C during the day with today forecast to be higher. Watering one's garden plants in March is not what I would have expected to do. Must be that phenomenon that the US President does not believe in.

Looking forward to the next installment.

Regards

Pete

I did some things. I've been working on a bigger lamont boiler but I had to pause to do family summer stuff and during the break I got the itch for boating again. So I've been working on the little boiler and the outboard.

I want to make a small modification to it, which is automatic water level maintaining. I pulled the top cover off so I could drill a hole for the water probe. I might also remove a bit of superheater while I'm in there. Yes, remove superheater, as I'm pretty sure the last steam up did some damage to the o-rings. The engine has a bit less friction, but doesn't pull as much vacuum when turned over by hand as it used to. Also the cotton insulation on the first foot of steam pipe out of the superheater burned off.
It's nice being able to just open up the whole boiler and look inside. Note that the rust is particles on the walls from well water, not eating into the walls, which are zinc plated.

I also threw together a simple controller using scrap parts. It only uses three transistors, no arduinos or anything. It also has an off delay of a few seconds to reduce short-cycling of the water pump.