I’ve been running-in my new Chaloner for a few weeks, and today was a nice day for steaming (80 degrees and breezy) so I took it to Jack’s Calusa Creek RR. After cleaning the jet (every time it goes for a car ride it has to be cleaned, or so it seems,) it ran quite nicely around the pool.
Then it lost traction - seemed like a slipping gear - and finally stopped dead; jammed. There are lots of gears on this little beast, and all the moving parts are held in place by little grub screws, so I am used to wheels moving out of alignment, etc. The slipping turned out to be the big gear on the axle.
This jam seemed like a lock in the cylinders. I figured out you can remove the oscillating engine quite easily if you have the right tool. The tool would fit between the boiler and cylinder frame - see arrow (I had got one out and was working the second one slowly as I didn’t have a perfect tool - my wrenches were too big and the metric sockets were too long to fit in the gap.)
Once those two screws were out, the cylinder block came off quite easily and turned out to be full of water, probably condensed, but otherwise spinning nicely. Hmmm. .
Before I went any further, I made a tool to put the screws back in. I have a set of small socket wrenches designed for 0, 00 and 1 size bolts (from Micromark) and one of them fits the bolt - except it is too long like the socket. So I took it back to the bench vise and found I could hacksaw the end off. I filed a couple of flats to make it easier to grip.
This pic shows the new short socket and an original size one.
In fact, before putting the cylinders back on, I had been scratching my head, undoing idler shaft gears, and trying to figure out what was going on. With the idler shaft gears loose it worked smoothly.
The reason was that the big drive gear on the axle had shifted and was now meshing with its drive pinion on idler shaft (2) and also with the large drive gear above on idler shaft (1) that meshes with the pinion on the cylinder block. The two arrows show this below.
I figured out that the mesh shouldn’t be happening, but the axle gear was a very unyielding fit on the axle, so I couldn’t figure out why it was meshing with the big gear. I finally got aggressive and twisted it forcefully away from the big gear and properly in to mesh with the pinion.
I just ran a quick test on blocks and we seem to have fixed the problem - until the next slippage.
