Survival Steam Engine <G> Question

It's odd how everybody assumes that steam is the way to go when you're off the line. There's a reason it was replaced for small horsepower applications in the early 1900s, the boilers tend to go bang if they're not tended properly, they take up a whole lot of space for the power you get out of them and they take a lot of maintenance. You also have to be a dedicated fireman/engine man while it's running, no going off to do other chores. Great to watch at a fair, though. Figure out how big a boiler you need for a couple of horsepower, that's what turned me off the idea. Not to mention the legal requirements for pressure-vessel testing and such before you can fire it up.

I'd get a copy of one of those producer gas books that Lindsey sells and see what I could do to build one of those generators, looks like it's mostly sheetmetal work that doesn't have to stand a lot of pressure. Seems to me that a propane-fueled engine like a forklift engine could be converted pretty easily.

Stan

Stan

We bought it already cracked (coarse ground). The mash is the mixture of water and the cracked grain. You gently cook that to convert the starches to sugars, then drain off the liquid, full of dissolved sugar, and ferment that. You can start the fermentation in the mash, that gives the distinctive sour mash flavor. But if you're shooting for maximum alcohol content, you just use the sugar water you produced, and feed the cooked cracked grain to the hogs. They'll mask the smell.

Gary

I don't know about the really deep wells, but the average 2300 foot depth wells around here use sucker rods that are the same size all the way down. You can get an idea of how heavy it all is by looking at the weights which counterbalance it on the other end of the walking beam. It is all nicely counterbalanced so the pump motor doesn't have to lift the weight of the rod on each stroke. BTW the rods screw together from 20 or 30 foot sections, they aren't all one piece. That would make it awfully hard to get them in or out of the well.

Gary

Not for the single leaf spring (out of the stack of leaves) model. But I did make one using a truck spring which required a boat winch to c*ck. That thing was more an artillery piece than something you'd carry in the woods, though.

Gary

I may be mixing up the chemistry of the mercuric and chlorate primer mixtures. But either one has proven to have an incredibly long storage life. I've fired ammo loaded for WWI, and it still works just fine.

Gary

(!)

Where did you grow up, anyway, Gary? First it's exploding CO2 cartidges. Then it's artillery-sized crossbows.

Now this. How to keep the revenue agents in the dark...

Jim

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I figured as much. I find this drilling stuff interesting. I forget who but someone was recalling some story about droping a wrench "downhole". I never thought of that before. These deep holes it'd probably take five minutes for it to hit bottom. I can't imagine what it'd take to get it back out, big magnet and a long string....

John

Please note that my return address is wrong due to the amount of junk email I get. So please respond to this message through the newsgroup.

I doubt there are many such sites, it's not a typical home project. But the technology is several hundred years old.

Get a large metal container, say an open top 55 gallon drum with top and sealing clamp, (Preferably stainless steel, it will last longer) Pack it loosely with reasonably dry vegetable matter (grass clippings, twigs, branches less than 1" in diameter, leaves, garden waste, etc.) Clamp on top. Attach 2" vent pipe to the drum bung, plumb off to distillation column. It's important to have a good air seal, so that air can't get into the drum except through the vent and distillation column. Heat drum by any means handy (Big solar mirror array, bonfire, whatever.) See:

As the drum heats, various liquid products (acetic acid, acetone, and wood alcohol, Turpentine if you are using resinous pine) will be distilled, mostly as a mixture, which can be collected and later fractionally distilled to separate the various components. (Or a more complex column can be used to separate them on the first run). As the heating continues, high concentration carbon monoxide is produced, which can be used directly as "wood gas". After all the volitiles and partial combustion products have been removes, the cool drum can be opened, and the charcoal residue can be removed and used for fuel in in your forge :-)

David Hughes

You buy it cracked, it's sold that way for animal feed. Then you "mash" it, which doesn't mean crushing it, but soaking it in warm water so the kernels expand and release the enzymes that convert the starches to fermentable sugars.

Try redrok.com . Somewhere is a huge data base like RCM drop box of alt. energy.

Remember that the rod is lifting column of fluid as deep as the well. which puts far more strain on the rod than weight of the rod itself . Making it thinner at the bottom doesn't solve this problem, actually make it worse.

In REALLY deep wells, you use multi stage pumps, where the lowest pump lifts the fluid the first mile, and feeds it into a second pump (powered by a second rod) to lift the next mile, and so on until you reach the surface.

There's an entire industry based on "fishing" stuff out of a well. Drill bits come loose or get stuck, other tools come loose from the "drill string" and fall until they get stuck or reach the bottom, random debris, etc. Some finished wells leave a "basket" at the bottom which they can retrieve to keep the little stuff from piling up at the bottom.

NOT a cheap process. Modern wells can cost a million dollars a day during drilling (that's just the cost of all the people and equipment sitting idle, more if actually in use!) I personally know of a case when a drill operator messed up while extracting a (expensive) tool from a well, and tore it free from the "drill string" just below the rig floor (that's the main platform of the rig, about 30' up) The tool fell all the way to the bottom (26,000'), blocking the bottom of the well, which still needed to be drilled deeper. They lowered and "investigation fish" which mounts a camera down, took a look, came back up, sent down a milling head to grind off the jagged end of the drill string, came back up, sent down a "radial fish" (basically a big screw extractor) which grabbed the end of the drill string, and brought the tool out.

The site foreman was less than pleased with the operator

Okay, one a day might not be enough. Seven per week should plenty, though, and if my calculations are accurate, should last almost as long.

R, Tom Q.

When I was a kid I made a 3.5 hp B&S into a steam engine. Pretty easy. Dissassemble the engine, yank out the camshaft, weld lobes on the back side of each cam, take the shaft to the belly grinder and clean it up. Square it up some mroe with a file. Re-assemble. Ditch the Carb and exhaust. I think I may have put the intake in the exhaust port (it was allready threaded nice for a pipe nipple). It ran ok off the air compressor, can't remember what pressure, wasn't much as I just held the air gun in the intake pipe and wrapped my glove around it to make it seal well enough to run.. Would have run better with an additional flywheel to carry it from one cycle to the next. It ran though, and didn't take much.

Funny thing is a couple years later I was fixing an engine for my go-kart, it had a busted cam. The only engine I had sitting around with a cam that would fit was the one in my steam engine........ I wasn't old enough to drive so I didn't have any other recourse. Yup, pulled the shaft, ground off my built up lobes, filed them clean. Bit of emmery cloth and the cam was in my engine. thought it might tear up the followers, but the thing ran fine for years. Think I still got it somewhere.

Dave

Better yet, forget about steam and modify a few bicycles to turn your generators. Then start breeding your power. :)

Dave

Not necisarily, If I understand some of them ran a sucker rod down to the pump wich was mounted down the shaft, so no real problem with a deep well so long as you put ypur pump down there too.

Dave

Sure smells funny though.

Gunner

Liberals - Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own. Benjamin Disraeli