Making a real steam engine


N

Nucular

Member
As one of my crazy goals for my O gauge layout, I have decided to try and engineer and actually make a real working steam engine.

Figuring this out I take it that I will need a tank to hold water. Then have an electrical water heating element in it like in a hot water tank. From there the pressure would have to activate a piston, and excess pressure would have to escape through a whistle. The electrical current would have to control how much heat the heating element puts out.

Anyhow does anyone have any advice on this or has done this? I am good at machining metal and experimenting with things. I figure that it would be cool to have an actual steam engine actually run off of steam.
 
there are some great videos on youtube about making miniature steam engines... just run a search for "how steam locomotives work" or something similar and you should get a bunch of results. There was one in particular that seemed like a perfect size for an o scale layout if you can figure out how to generate the steam just build the piston/connecting rod assembly shown there and figure out how to hook it up to your layout. Don't forget though, it will take time for your electrical current to generate steam. That is the biggest problem that I see trying to do this is making sure that the engine operated safely around the electricity. Spring a leak and you could cause some problems...
 
In the past there was a company call "Little Engines" that sold any part needed to make a live steam loco, from O scale and larger. Do a google search on them and see if they are still around. There was also a magazine devoted to this called "Live Steam".

There is also a company out of England called Aster, that builds live steam locos in O scale up to G scale. There is quite a following of live steam out there, and a google search will direct you to them.

Building a live steam locomotive is not for the faint hearted. It can take years, lots of machine tools and the skill to use them to build an engine that is not only safe, but fun.
 
Steam engines are enormously inefficient compared with electric motors, and most likely it's even worse for small ones. You probably can't run a live steam loco off the same electrical source that you'd use to run an electrically powered one.

Anyway, the power on the rails would only generate the steam. You need throttle and regulator settings to control the train. But maybe this could be done with DCC functions?

Then there are injectors and blowdown valves and who knows what.
 
Hmmm, I wonder if you could make a locomotive that runs off of smoke juice? The concept is the same (liquid transformed into a gas by means of a heat source). It might be easier, would still "look right", and possibly could be done in even smaller scales.:D

Hey, if they have Lego locomotives that run off of air pressure, couldn't you build an O (or maybe even HO) locomotive that runs off of smoke juice?
 
Building a live steamer isn't that difficult if you have the time and tools. Do it right and you'll get a lot of use out of it. Do it wrong and it'll do a neat job of erasing any trace of you and your workshop.
 
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