Burrell Traction Engine - Bearings, Perch bracket, Chimney base, Chimney cap

Burrell Traction Engine - Bearings, Perch bracket, Chimney base, Chimney cap...

The current part I have been working on is the front fork, this is a cast iron part and as such has a good bearing surface for use with a steel liner I'm told. However, the drawing calls for a bronze liner but states that this is optional. In previous times bronze was cheap and used extensively on old drawings but being relatively new to the model engineering hobby I decided to follow the drawing.

The bearing though being quite long, I didn't have a piece of bronze that long, but I did have 2 smaller offcuts for other parts I have made in the past. I decided to make it in 2 parts rather like an upper and lower bearing with a small space in the middle to pack with grease.

In the future, I'm going to look into using Oilite bearings for similar parts. The thought of boring a large hole in a solid piece of bronze and all the waste material produced in order to obtain just a thin wall bush seems wasteful. This time the two pieces of bronze already had large diameter holes in them and I could not see any other use for them !!

Drilling into the cast iron is proving not easy, the drills cut nice but seem to move off the start center
or it's me. I've marked and drilled a few parts and had to adust after luckily I hadn't drilled the final size hole so I could adjust as I was doing it.

Not many photos to show in this installment and the odd bushes that I have made are not particularly interesting other than a bush, but hopefully, in the coming week a bit more to report or describe.

For now, hoping for some good cast iron machining luck ......

To remind what i'm trying to build.

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3" Burrell Traction Engine build.

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