You just need to keep bending a bit, flatten, bend a bit more and so on.
If you can't manage that then turn a short "ring" on the end of some bar, round the end over to match the beading profile and part off. You can then cut two corners out if the ring and just run straight lengths upto them
As purchased, half-round beading is quite hard. I'm fairly sure that I would have annealed the beading for my Allchin tender. Heating towards dull red makes it much more amenable.
I keep seeing posts that say how many years someone has been working on one of these engines. I am tempted to build one, but I am already 67 and suffer long term affects from a motorcycle accident, so I am wondering what the timeline is in hours. For reference, I have a Hardinge HLV-BL and a Bridgeport with a ProtoTrak MX2 and I was a journeyman tool and die maker. Thanks
Some only work on them for an hour per week or less, you might work 8 hours days on it.
The drawings are identical to the book, but the book has better detail size info in hidden in the wording. Some of the GM castings available are steel in the book.
The brake drum has the biggest ratchet you ever did see.
A lot of Minnie is plate-work and riveting, You'll note that Brian still has all his wheel rivets to do and some of the smokebox ones are missing too .
For Django, you obviously have the background and the workshop. My two penn'orth would be that a Minnie might take around 1000 hours, ie 2 years @ 10 hours per week for someone who knew what they were doing. Quite a bit of the tedium can be avoided with ready-cut spokes and strakes, gears are also available. A pro boiler would be a time-saver.
With what you have done on the beam and what machines you have I would say you could do without quite a lot of the castings, I certainly would if building another one. I think most of mine came from Reeves and the boiler Blackgates, would likely still use Reeves and Weston Steam for the boiler these days
At the rate you built that Beam engine it will not take you tool long to do a Minnie, mine was 13yrs but would go 6months or more between me doing anything with it and I had very limited workshop equipment back then.
The old ME articles can still be found on this site if you know where to look, just change the last 4 digits of teh url to get the next issue number and get them while you can.
I agree with Jason – most of the castings are more trouble than they're worth, better to use stock materials (or make your own castings, something I've just started with, for a future project mainly).
With your knowledge and equipment Django, I'm sure it wouldn't take you long to build a Minnie. The following pics are the state of play with mine as of today. I ordered the materials for the boiler almost exactly a year ago, so this is about a year's worth, by no means working on it every day. I bought laser cut spokes and strakes, but made the boiler and gears.
Friends – I have a 1" Minnie I recently bought in the UK. I want to run a steam line to it from one of my 3/4" locomotives. Where could one place a fitting to which one could attach a steam line? As a US-American, domeless traction engines are new to me. Thanks!
Dear Jason: Of course, many thanks! I did not even know where the plug for filling with water was! That would be an obvious place to connect. Is there a booklet on how to run a Minnie? I have the book on constructing Minnie, but I don’t think it will help. Is this thread the best place to get info on a Minnie, or is there a group of Minnie owners meeting and consoling each other somewhere on-line?
A lot gets hidden by the final drive. With the two connections at pump and bypass being in line you will always have to kick one pipe sideways to miss the other.
Mine run closer together, though if I were doing it now they would be horizontal and parallel to each other forward of the wheel and I would do tighter bends, but I did not know any better at the time.