Don't try this at home - or anywhere else. The Stanley Bros are rotating in crypt.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/webcont ... 79a&ei=175

Whooee!! That's terrible!! I wonder how those guys didn't blow themselves up.

I'm also reminded of some comments by Jay Leno, who has several steam cars in his auto collection. He's remarked, more than once, that you need to forget almost everything you know about cars to work with and run a steam car. His most common remark in that regard is that while you have to find ways to dispose of excess heat in an internal combustion engine, with a steam engine you need to keep the heat in!! Totally backwards compared to conventional cars!!

Of course, these guys didn't do any of that--and didn't learn anything before trying out this!

Jeesh, I can understand people not knowing things back in the day of Welsh mine pumping engines and the early tramways of Great Britain and the United States--but this failure to research how such machines work, and the forces within them, is just insane!!

P.S.--Mentioning the Stanley Brothers, I read about how they tried to cut some weight from their boilers, which carried 600 psi, and relied on wire wrapping to reinforce the shell. They decided to see if they could lay off a layer or two of the wire.

The result was an explosion well below the 600 psi. Thankfully they ran the test with the boiler in a pit, so no flying metal hit anything, but they broke every window in every building for blocks around!

Speaking of which - I have seen wire wound reinforcement also on canon barrels.

Why is winding a barrel with wire stronger than just making the barrel thicker in the first place? Same question for the Stanley boilers.

It's NOT.

A Stanley wirewound boiler is MUCH stronger than just a piece of plate. Keeping in mind that the usual amount of winding gives massive overstrength, 5x or more the actual rupture strength. Keep in mind that pressure is gained and lost relatively smoothly, so analogies with impulse or explosive don't apply.

On the other hand, this is Garage 64 we're talking about. The best and worst of smekalka on display, each and every day. No more a practical demonstration of best practices in steam power design than those steam buses of the early Seventies...

Overmod wrote: "No more a practical demonstration of best practices in steam power design than those steam buses of the early Seventies..."

Mr. Ellsworth, are you referring, at least in part, to the design by Bill Lear from that era? I recall that they were to use a steam opposed-piston design in a "delta" configuration and am wondering if a prototype was built.

Brian Smith

I have much less criticism for the actual designs than for the all-too-typical Government program that purported to be developing them. If you have not seen the documentary "Steam Bus!" you should do so ASAP. Watch carefully for the issues that kept coming up with what the State expected to receive 'timely' for the money they disbursed. It was remarkably similar to the catch-22 with certain 1361s and 1309s that needed to show the scope of work done before any money to conduct that work would be provided.

While there were certain aspects of BCR-style 'milking the opportunity' going on with some of the design efforts, I have very little doubt that with less whopperjobbed funds access, a good steam-engined bus could have been built and commercialized. More so if some of the results of GM's coal-burning Eldorado experiment with SRC been available that odd decade earlier...

I am not getting a satisfactory answer. At 12:40, they are winding the naval gun barrel with wire. Why?

https://youtu.be/a6CMRq-ChA0?si=n2pXyflptRKKyJxR

Wire winding adds strength while keeping the weight down. This was done with built up artillery, and was pretty common into the WW II era.

One thing that stands out in that film from about 1918 is how large everything is. It's no wonder it required those 100-ton gun flats, usually used in pairs, to handle a large naval rifle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built-up_gun

Item 8 in this promotional material from Stanley mentions the wire winding on the boiler.

http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/FAQ ... nswers.htm

I have to admit I don't get this one, but I defer to the superior brainpower and education of Brother Ellsworth. I respectfully stand corrected...

I'm not certain I'm up to the task, and maybe I'm full of hooey, but the best way I can imagine it would be to think of a barrel of wood, and how the hoops hold it together. They hold it by compression, and the smaller, and lighter hoops, with minimal weight, hold together what can be quite large casks, as used in wineries and distilleries.

That's my best interpretation, or parallel, that I can come up with for wire windings for artillery, and Stanley vertical tube boilers.

A USN 16" 50 calibre gun barrel weighs 239,156 lb (108,479 kg) (without breech). Length is 816 in (68.0 ft; 20.7 m) from breech face to muzzle. USN Iowa Class Battleships have 9 of these. In these big guns "calibre" means ratio between bore (16") and length.

I understand when new they needed extra-heavy flatcars and spacer cars to move them from Illinois to Brooklyn or Philadelphia. Remember the breech end is much heavier than the muzzle end.

Currently USS New Jersey (BB-62) is drydocked in Philadelpia, getting her bottom painted (necessary when a steel ship is kept in salt water; the Delaware in Camden NJ is not as salty as the ocean but it is salt water). She was built in that same graving dock.

Phil Mulligan

We are cheating a bit by not discussing the characteristics of the 'wire' in question.

Look up the processes by which "piano wire" becomes suitable for the requirements of pianofortes. This kind of hard-shell, tough-core material is what is used for winding the Stanley boilers. Very high tensile strength, and reasonably nonyielding over repeated cycles of stress.

The principle is similar to 'wound' pressure vessels: a fiber with high axial tensile strength is wrapped around the actual 'pressure vessel' to absorb swelling, and to distribute the retaining force more evenly over the surface.

Now, if you use the wrong metallurgy, or a misguided hardening method, you indeed start making a bomb. See the problems with 'hardened steel wire' in bridge construction in the 1920s, as described by Steinman. Some of those large composite bridge catenary main cables began to suffer accelerated strain breakage of strands in the cable, which of course more or less promptly shed more load onto the associated close segments of other strands in the cable... silent damage until the cumulative shedding reaches a critical rate...

Getting back to the initial video clip, I'm sure I'm not the only "steam nerd" here who has considered how to make a steam-powered road vehicle. There are some who have done so. One that sticks out in my memory is a guy in NW Ohio who built a "road locomotive" that he uses to pull a passenger-hauling trailer at local fairs. It definitely can run faster than his slow vehicle triangle marker allows for.

I think I would start with an old pickup truck that has a failed engine, so it would be much cheaper to acquire. Having watched more than a few videos of steam-powered road vehicles here and abroad, I like the idea of using a Heisler-style two-cylinder "V" formation connected to a central driveshaft to the rear wheels, not sure about the gear ratio in the differential, with the torque of a steam engine it might not need any reduction, maybe a high and low range?. I would use a liquid fuel fired boiler, leaning towards a water tube type for speed of reaching operating pressure, and also so I don't have to have access to it from the cab to keep it going, located in the bed of the vehicle. The biggest questions for me are where the cylinders would go, under the hood or also in the bed and the normal engine compartment becomes either space for auxiliaries and fuel or water tanks, or extra storage space like on a rear engine car? Having watched Jay Leno's videos of his various steam cars, I'm pretty sure it would work reasonably well. I'm just not much of a mechanic or machinist, or have any kind of room as an apartment dweller for such a project. It's an interesting thought experiment to me.

Ted Pritchard, of Australia, converted a Ford Falcon to steam. The layout was pretty logical. With condenser up front, then the steam generator and finally the V-2 engine next to the firewall, connected to the drive shaft.

http://kimmelsteam.com/pritchard.html