Oh, Juni!
Don’t throw away an opportunity to put at least a little bit of light on your work!
Come on, you can do at least one. (I will talk to her!)
Guys, say, what do you think?
0S5A0R0A3
Well, you know what I’d say. And to either or both … her choice … whenever she has the time. (And I promise to keep digits-off, too…)
So moved. Do I hear a second?
This being precisely the thing that would have to change, and massively, and with both technical knowledge and equipment/material support, in order for any modern steam to thrive there.
Porta had the advantage of not having either an ideological bias against the revolution or a Government interdict on being involved, or trading, or even advising “the enemy”. He was in a position to have technical cadres established who would then coach and mentor all the ongoing people, both the next generations of ‘staff college’ and the mechanics in the field, and see that the new blood got preferential access to better equipment, internal promotion, an infrastructure of reward, and not incidentally a good grounding in his particular somewhat Bartini-esque philosophy of work and wisdom.
It makes me no less patriotic to say that I was hoping he’d succeed, even if it vastly strengthened the government-in-being for a time. Perhaps the idea still will, in some form.
Well, God rest his noble soul!
Maestro Porta didn’t see “left,” and he didn’t see “right,” he only saw steam and the best ways to keep it alive, no matter who used it. One has to admire him for that.
A steam locomotive’s like a big friendly dog, it’s apolitical.
The rudder bearing support for CVN’s is on the order of a 400 ton casting, so casting an engine bed may not be completely out of the question… Pricing may be a bit on the high side.[:-^]
On the other hand, maybe we can wait till someone makes a big enough 3D printer. Second best thing would be using 3D printed sand molds, though based on the one example of the 3D printed sand molds, a set for the T1 engine bed would be on the order of $10 million.
Mercury topping cycles come to mind, along with the D&H 1400-1403 series of experimentals. On a more recent note, the Ft St Vrain HTGR was built with steam turbine driven helium circulators to give a fraction of a per cent better thermal efficiency. The problem was that shaft seals on the turbine end were leaking a bit of steam into the helium side and that steam was not a particularly nice thing to have in intimate contact with the very hot graphite moderator.
Sara,
Ok - but I would need at least three members to request a posting to do it.
I think that’s fair in view of the effort it takes to put it up.
And I choose which one.
=J=
Eric wrote: “On the other hand, maybe we can wait till someone makes a big enough 3D printer. Second best thing would be using 3D printed sand molds, though based on the one example of the 3D printed sand molds, a set for the T1 engine bed would be on the order of $10 million.”
I had told the T1 5500 society years ago that there is a less costly method for building a one-off piece of frame: steel plates cutting, braces, guide stays, etc and welding it all into one piece. In tendency it will be lighter, yet it has to be normalized in the end and also it does not have fully the same quality of keeping to design measures as the old one-piece molding, yet it can be designed to fit the demand. But I got the impression it didn’t find open ears, so to say. Neither my promoting fully welded construction for the boiler …
Ok …
=J=
3:24 ? what time is that?
I’d like to hear about your work.
As for the T1 project’s frame and boiler, here’s a discussion over on RYPN from a couple years ago about that very subject, with a post from their general manager explaining why they did not choose a cast frame:
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43986&start=30
J,
I was being a bit facetious with the 3D printer comment.
As for the materials aspect, I’ve told my son that there should be a big future in working on materials for 3D printing with his search for grad school. Strangely enough, stainless steel can actually perform better being 3D printed due to the rapid quenching.
A large part of this used to be because the process was a braze rather than sintering. Very effective structures can be fabricated from that, including prototype rocket-engine components (remember the NASA contest?) I had a certain disdain for brazing, as being kind of the poor relation of proper fusion welding, until I started learning stainless and titanium airframe construction. Opened my eyes!
With the advent of cheap fiber lasers (how quickly disks seem to have become obsolescent!) practical joining of 5" or thicker sections has become essentially routine, with surprisingly small HAZ in practice. Normalizing the structure still is wise, and takes time, but you can literally build the necessary CA ‘furnace’ in a back yard and fire it with domestic gas…
If you look at the original feasibility plan for 5550, the ‘default’ was always to be lost-foam castings and waterjet/laser (shipyard cut if necessary) hydroformed plate. That puts engineered material in place of structurally-indeterminate bulk mass in the engine bed, but keeps the advantages of castings where appropriate (and, perhaps importantly for the historians, allows a certain similarity to the control dimensions of the original).
In some alternate life I was told that GSC cast engine beds in multiple simultaneous pours, with slightly different alloy composition for different parts diffusing together seamlessly. This was attractive enough that I took it as design ‘gospel’ until a couple of people with real-world forging experience and historical knowledge of GSC and locomotive builders noted it was done with just two pours… hence the intricate gating, very large excess capacity in it, and the expressed expectation that multiple castings would be needed to ensure a fully ‘usable’ result. Personally… I
Well yes and no.
Would a person “flame” me for suggesting that both South Africa in the era of the Red Devil along with Cuba at the time of the Prometheous project were pariah nation states in that both were subject to economic sanctions?
That in a free-and-open-trade situation, diesels are what people use, but if your country isn’t free to trade with other countries, for whatever reason, steam is considered?
As Overmod suggested, it appears that for steam to reemerge in one of these pariah countries, there has to be a confluence of this status along with the sanctions not driving the country in question so far backward that it cannot find people to fabricate a boiler?
In the Red Devil, Wardale chronicles experience in three cultures of countries with some level of pariah status. The U.S. could be considered in this category because the early 70’s and early 80’s “oil shocks” could be considered non-free markets in oil where other countries were sanctioning the U.S.?
In South Africa, Wardale, with some exceptions, found a “can do” spirit among the train crews and shop workers although the higher-ups were “passive aggressive” on retaining steam. In the U.S., the effort was largely mired in Vu-Graphs and meetings and never cut any metal – HSR is encountering the same problems here in the 21st century. In China, they had emerged from the Maoist days just long enough to bring in Wardale but not long enough to get past the
Pariah nations? Certainly South Africa at the time, but Cuba was a little different. Only the United States had an embargo on Cuba, Cuba could trade with any other nation they wanted to, and vice versa.
I’ve seen this on and off in the past, blaming the big bad US for Cuba’s economic woes. Sorry, their economic problems weren’t our fault, they were THEIR fault.
Communism doesn’t work. Even the CCP figured that out.
What kind of political/economic system does China have now? In an odd way it makes me think of Fascist Italy, a capitalist economic system under the rigid control of a dictatorship.
I have been asked to reconsider my posting, I may have taken a few things
Paul wrote too hard. So I deleted it.
Sara the one and only 05003
I started this thread with the idea that bringing back steam locomotives to do useful work was a good thing. I brought up the Prometheus project in Cuba as having had possibilities. Instead of “going big”, this project “went small”, and a small high-tech steam locomotive may have a better chance of succeeding. For starters, smaller things are less costly to build than big things.
The word pariah means an “outcast” or a person who is “despised and avoided.” If you are a pariah, that does not mean that you are a bad person. It means that there are people, who for whatever reason, don’t want to associate with you.
OK, I “get” that the only country “shunning” Cuba and its people is the United States?
Blame it on the U.S., blame it on Communism, blame it on the fall of Communism, blame it on past neo-colonialism, blame it on the weather, Cuba is not a powerful and wealthy country. I suggested that the need for Cuba to engage in self-reliance rather than just importing diesel locomotives and diesel fuel like everyone else could have been a catalyst for the reemergence of a steam locomotive others would want.
This business of having every word parsed and every idea questioned is simply getting out of control.
And it would have made a lot of sense for them. The beauty of a steam locomotive is as long as you’ve got something to burn in the firebox you’ve got power. In Cuba’s case all that bagasse from the sugar cane fields. The Filipinos burned bagasse in their steamers too.
If you don’t have coal or oil you burn what you’ve got.
As those Spanish speakers would say, “Quando hay hambre, no hay pan duro.”
When one is hungry, there’s no hard bread.
As those Spanish speakers would say, “Quando hay hambre, no hay pan duro.”<<
Oh, yes, ohhh yes!
Sara
.
For those interested, Shaun McMahon is giving an online presentation on the LVM 800 concept on May 15 13 at 3pm Argentina time (GMT-3 so a couple of hours later than most USA time). While the presentation will likely be in Spanish, neither the questions nor comments will need to be, and I’m sure you can arrange proper contact with Mr. McMahon for more. Register here:
https://forms.gle/CmE8CsY1jLbJsS4X6
(the link printed on the materials was a disaster, in all caps and contrasting colors)
The link has a button for an English-language translation and offers a simple-to-fill out form. The talk appears to be the first in a series in using biomass as an energy resource – remember, the LVM 800 was intended to burn ag waste.
Do you have any idea if this will be recorded? Should one register to be able to see the recording, or will this be posted to a Web site as other talks of public interest often are?
By the way, US Central Daylight Time is 2 hours earlier than Argentina, so the talk at 3 PM in Argentina should start at 1 PM in Chicago or Milwaukee.