The Steamboating Forum

In the San Juan islands, where I live, there is a large and continuing supply of drift wood above the high tide line. Several steamers, the Fire Canoe included, have made use of this resource for travel beyond the local area. There are, of course, several drawbacks. Before you guys start tuning up about the usual things, here is a short list that I know of.

Burning salt produces toxic byproducts. Yes, it is a problem with big pulp mills but I have my doubts about this being a problem with a boiler. Right now, I am burning fir in my living room stove that has never been floating about the bay and the flames are very yellow. As far as I know (not far) this color comes from sodium which almost has to in compound with chlorine. My ancestors have been burning wood for a gazillion years now an mostly dieing from alcohol and bad marriages rather than stove fumes. Maybe a problem but I'll live with it.

Salt corroding the boiler. Hm. If I swamp out the flues in my VFT with a flue brush fairly regularly, it shouldn't be a problem. The corrosion would happen when the boiler was laying around between uses with moisture from the air combining with the salt to cause corrosion. I dunno how you clean out a water tube boiler. I guess Tommy Thompson didn't clean his out and had to replace his boiler at least once.

Wet wood. Depends. Most of the wood has been out of the water for a long time. It has been in the rain though. So the outer five percent of it is wet. This is a significant problem. It will take a bit of time after each firing to evaporate the water. Significant loss of efficiency.

But the stuff is free and stored along my way so I can live with those problems if the boat will continue to move along.

If my power plant is running O.K. with dry wood, what can I do to burn wetter wood? The answer usually bandied about is to use some increased draft. But how to do it. All of the stories I have head about cramming air in at the bottom end up with more stories about a face full of soot and singed eyebrows. On a locomotive or donkey boiler, the only types I have run much, we use induced draft with a steam nozzle at the stack end of the boiler. The nozzle uses either engine exhaust or boiler steam direct. I don't want to use either of these methods. I boat in salt water and hauling along a bunch of makeup water is out.

There remains a fan in the stack or some way of blowing air up the stack. I just can't see how to do the fan thing without a really Rube Goldberg setup of some sort. A flex cable or electric fan or an auxiliary engine running all the time. Have I missed a way to do this?

So I am down to blowing air up the stack. Steve Harcourt has a turbocharger off of Wes's Buick rigged so that the engine exhaust spins it (at a tiny fraction of automotive speeds!) and the compressor side is fed up the stack. He reports that it will suck flames out the stack! But it reportedly makes a racket from the air intake. Worth looking into though.

My brainstorm, the one that has me bothering all of you, is to use an automotive smog pump belted off of the main engine or an auxiliary engine with the output fed up the stack. I cannot find ANY specs on these pumps. I know that they run forever with no maintenance. They produce enough pressure to overcome the average pressure in a car exhaust, perhaps a few psi. They blow though a one inch rubber hose and my memory is that the 'blast' is some what less than a shop vac output when reversed but more than I can blow myself (No wise cracks).

I dunno if I will have to step it up too much for practicality. Might end up with way too big of a pulley on the engine.

Have any of you tried this? I'm going to try spinning one with my drill press motor this week. Wish me luck.

Mike

Mike,Mike,Oh Mike! Put a tall stack on her and she'll do just fine! Burn dry wood -they told us to do that in our homes-they weren't kidding! put wet wood in a steamer and you'll get steam alright.Right up the chimney! I could not believe how little steam was produced in the boiler. Sure you can always burn more but how much room have you got? I've seen some of the old pics of Fire Canoe-there was no room for people! Just wood and they made several stops en route as well.All this other stuff is just something else to go wrong. And you have very limited horsepower so any extras [belt or shaft driven] are going to rob power from the prop-big time.Whenever I hook up the alternator [seldom!] the boat speed plummets! So stay low tech and dry the wood out and go steamin' For Free!! Den

By using "entrainment" you don't need vast quantities of air to move the flue gasses. A small air tube through into the flue, part way up, and pointing in the direction of flow, will bring on the fire immensely, and only requires a few PSI (10 - 15+). I do agree it's a further complication, but sometimes such things get us what we want.

You'll have to factor in some way to have the pulley freewheel whilst running in reverse. That's another benefit of the turbo in addition to being "free" (no HP taken from the engine to operate); always spins and blows air in the right direction. One must think of an airbox that muffles the intake though, it's really unpleasant how loud it is. Something plumbed into the bilge perhaps.

Induced draft would be much better than forced. We started with forced on my dad's boat, but the combustion gasses leaking out of every nook and cranny were too much.

Mike- Make the boiler big enough to accept 16" wood,so make it 20" if space allows.Mine only takes 12" wood and it takes the same amount of time to cut and split and stack 16" as 12" Also cutting driftwood really is tough on your bar and chain as the sand penatrates deep into the cracks -even clean wood is full of sand! Watch some of the UK videos-they burn black rocks at amazing temperatures! too bad we can't get that at a reasonable price but that would still be more than Free now wouldn't it? Den

Lots of good advice. I'm listening and thinking.

I won't do anything until I get the whole mess running and get some experience with performance and consumption.

Can't make the stack much taller. The boiler is a Beckman VFT-30 and I'll have to live with the firebox I have. I hadn't thought about cutting the wood as long as would fit. I assumed I would want to chop it up shorter for convenience in getting an even fire. I will certainly try it both ways.

Yeah, my memory of riding in the Fire Canoe is that it was a large vessel and that Tommy wasn't that concerned with economy. Folly is light and narrow. Seven foot beam. And I've never been that enamored of steaming at top speed. The economy at 3/4 speed should be much better for longer runs. I'm a sailor and I'm accustomed to wandering all over the bay and traveling at comically slow speeds.

Wes, the biggest problem I've been having so far with the turbo solution is finding one small enough. I looked at one off of a Mercedes 300D today and it is about the size of the top half of my engine! Further research.

Thanks all,

Mike

I had always planned solid fuel firing for my steamer, but time constraints changed things:

Getting my steamboat ready in a hurry for the last steamboat meet in 2010, I just went to Home Depot and spent $35 USD on a big propane weed burner, attached it to a 20 pound propane barbeque cylinder, and I was steaming on the water.

The sidewheeler gets about 4 Miles per gallon of propane, and that translates to about $4.25 USD per hour. I think a typical summer season will involve about 40 hours of actual cruising, thus $170.00 USD per year. The boat, engine, boiler, trailer, and X5 to tow it around costs on the order of $500 per month for 10 years!

As you can see, the economics don’t add up to much concern over steamboat fuel costs. It is a very small part of the overall expenses. Free firewood, coal at $150 per ton (a high price, but cheaper than purchased chord wood), or the most expensive fuel around, propane, it just doesn’t matter much.

For me the propane is so convenient, and the boiler tubes stay perfectly clean, I may just stay with it. What I do miss is the wonderful smell of wood or coal burning, and the stack showing some small amount of smoke.

Mike OK OK If you must go Hi-tech I saw the tiniest turbo on a d i e s e l Woodmizer sawmill .Can't remember the engine make but that might be small enough!

Fred, I'm so impressed that you are getting such good mileage. I have thought about carrying a five gallon bottle and a burner like that for a backup. If you have a picture of your burner I'd love to know more. Single stage regulator?

Mike

Turbo off of a Subaru or Mitsubishi are quite small. If you can find a turbo off of a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 or a Dodge
Stealth R/T (same car) the turbos (2) are REALLY small...

One thing you may want to look into before forcing or inducing draft is your stack temperature. With a VFT, you may want to add turbulators and depending on how high the stack temp is compared to steam temp, perhaps a stack damper like on a wood stove to keep the heat IN rather than letting it heat up your surroundings...