MILLER BEAM ENGINE pt 4 #883 VERTICAL VERSION tubalcain

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:06]howdy again it's Mr Pete welcome back to the shop and this is part four and that's tips number 883 I hope you watch the other three parts of this four-part video and in this one I'm continuing with uh the little Miller beam engine three in one so it's a beam engine it's a horizontal and it's a vertical now in the other videos I showed you two of the other configurations and this time I will be converting the horizontal into a vertical so I need to take this apart but I do not need to totally disassemble it because I've been looking at the drawing and some of the parts and the way they're bolted on were uh common between the horizontal and the vertical so I will not take it completely apart and I'll do that off camera because you've seen me do that in part one and here of course is the beam version of it that's the one I've had for 20 years and this is the one I've had for 20 days and I'm having a good time with it and we'll run it after I get it into the vertical so let's begin all right it's in the horizontal configuration and I will need these two uprights here you've seen me use these in the other uh videos and I believe I will not need any of these parts at all other than maybe some of the Fasteners but probably not even that now one thing I pointed out in earlier videos that this is Bakelite and Bakelite is a thermoset plastic so it does not change shape and it can stand heat and it can be molded into many shapes and some of the shapes you're most familiar with are probably a Distributors caps on cars when they had Distributors of course they don't anymore but bake light was also used in many home furnishings and ladies comb so it was a very popular material and it's very suitable here because it won't rust but it would be brittle if you hit this with a ball peen hammer it would crack I interrupt this video to give you a short Pop Quiz who is this famous man and he's been dead for 70 years but uh he was a chemist what is his name and I will tell you at the end of the video there's another picture of him okay here it is partially stripped down with some parts left intact and you'll see why although I might have to disassemble some of this I'm not sure yet and of course the connecting rod and piston will be in the vertical position but all of this should be correct now I haven't done this before so I may have to go back and redo a few things but no not that one this one will go into place right back here this upright with two screws and I'll tighten those put nuts on them and tighten them from the bottom so that's the first part and now with the upright fastened in place I'm going to take this part I still don't know what you call this and I'm just raising it upright and putting this part into the upright I wish I knew all of the terms for the parts I guess it doesn't matter a boy wouldn't care would he and then a brass nut on the brass screw that's not a shoulder Bolt I'll snug that up as usual they do not need to be very tight and now you can see the action here and this is of course all for the valve nothing like a real steam engine as I have said before and now using the upright that in the beam configuration is right here and I'll install that with two screws now notice that there are naturally two sides but the side with the injection Marks here are ejector marks will go toward the back maybe that doesn't make any difference I don't know for sure put those screws in those two holes and I'll put the nuts on from the bottom and be right back at first I thought the cylinder could be used just as you see it here but the valve is coming in from the wrong way it has to be on the back side so I will remove these two screws and reinstall it at 90 degrees so that these two screws will go into the other two holes and before I do that I will have to fasten the saddle casting onto the upright right here otherwise there's no access to the head of this screw and there it is take the two screws out and it will be installed like this but first I have to fasten this onto the upright now one other thing to note here remember there's a little Peg here that's castrated and one screw so the peg in this case goes into this slot on the top just like that and only one screw again is necessary to hold it Brilliance in engineering and one nut back here and I'll be right back well I just discovered that if I mount the cylinder on here then I can't get the piston in there isn't room or if I put the Piston into the cylinder first I still quick can't fit it in so well I don't know why I'm making a big deal of it because all I gotta just do is take that screw out and I am ready and these two screws in the top and notice the nipple is pointing out toward the camera and then I'll fasten the connecting rod back onto the crank I had to make a slight adjustment so I moved the entire main shaft out about an eighth of an inch because there was a bind right here which meant that I had to readjust the flywheel so it's pretty much in the middle of the slot and of course reposition the little pulley back here one other thing that I noticed is that this upright here really lacks rigidity and I think could probably be easily broken by a child assembling it you know and without any finesse but at this point it uh turns freely but still need the valve and the dog bone which just goes in right like what right here and then I'll put a little screw in there and we're essentially done plus of course the steam line I have already oiled all of the moving Parts I don't need to show you that again you're probably sick of it but I noticed a little interference right here let me zoom in in this view watch the end of this bolt here and it strikes the flywheel just a little bit see that so I either have to reverse that bolt or get a in other words put the nut on the other end or I think I can move the flywheel just a little bit toward the boiler but I don't want it to strike the casting so I'll do that simply because that would be the easiest way if that fails I'll go with plan B okay that works just fine so I moved the flywheel over and now I've got the clearance there that I desired and I didn't have quite enough end play there was a little bit of a bind so I loosened up those little brass pulley and moved it out perhaps the 30 second of an inch and it turns quite freely and the valve moves nicely so we're about ready to fire this little beauty up and these are the parts that are left over and you know I think there was a couple Fasteners I never did use but it doesn't matter and I will keep all of these parts in a zip Block Bag they didn't have Ziploc bags then matter of fact they didn't hardly have plastic yet in 1946 or at least not the way we know it now so I'll add just a little bit of water to Leo bakeland's boiler and I'll be right back and let's see if it runs there is no sight glass so to determine how much water I have in there I simply use a wooden dowel and look for the wet spot which doesn't show up real well does it but there's not much in there and by the way it looks just like the picture doesn't it and just like the blueprint before I put the boiler cap back on I did mention that this is the pop-off valve that is relief valve there's a nice gasket here still in good shape but if you look at in the hole here that isn't going to show up at all but there is a tiny little spring-loaded ball bearing and that is the pressure relief and I suspect that it's probably approximately five pounds of pressure I'm going to put it in my mouth see if I can hear it move I doubt it no all right it's already percolating can you see the steam come out and it's only been really too well a minute and a half okay we got a problem here it does not run it's fighting me so there's something wrong in the valve timing here I do not think that it's adjustable but I will have to fiddle with this and I will be back in 10 minutes or 10 hours or whatever it takes me to figure this out you can see that the flywheel is slipping on the shaft so the pressure is coming in at the wrong time and the timing isn't really adjustable so let me see how I can solve the problem if in fact I can this isn't rocket science but okay there it is I finally got it running it's three days later although I took a day off for the Fourth of July but I think that I probably worked six or eight hours to troubleshoot this and find out what the actual problem was that it would not run I became so frustrated I actually considered throwing the thing away and at some point I decided that I was going to go ahead and convert this one to the vertical and see if that would solve the problem but I didn't get around to that however I did take some measurements off of the valving system and it was all in the valve so I'm going to explain that all in great detail if you want to hear about it but if you are not interested this is it and these little pieces of blue tape here might indicate to you what I actually did and boy is that hot thank you Leo and it runs great matter of fact too good to be true right now all right I'm going to unplug it right now we'll see how long it runs after I pull the plug out there it is and it doesn't run very long does it perhaps what 10 or 15 seconds now everything is hot on here so a boy would soon learn that and this is really hot but remember that the steam is traveling through the cylinder here and once the water condenses and it gets good and hot it runs pretty smoothly and not too much of a water loss but I think you know that the old steam locomotives had a stopwatch every 30 miles or sold for water and they're in the olden days they needed more water than they needed coal well I know you're going to laugh at my primitive method here but earlier in the video or one of the other parts I forgot which one I talked about the plug here on the boiler which not only is a plug but it is a pressure relief valve so there's a little ball in there and a little spring and I talked about that before and pushing with a drill bit I can feel the ball move I don't think you're going to be able to see that at all but I do not have a pressure gauge that goes low enough to measure the pressure and I was estimating it at three or four or five PSI but using a cheap little postage scale which I've had forever and taking a drill bit you following the logic here I'm going to put it right on the scale and of course if I push hard enough down it goes but I'm pushing can you see that just enough where I can feel it you probably can't tell but I can feel the ball moving and the actual pressure is about four ounces not pounds this is ounces on a postal scale so I thought that was interesting let me know if you like that little crude experiment put it in the comments why are you talking that way because I'm happy I finally got the thing running well you can see by looking around the table here that I had a real mess and I already put some of the tools away but why do you see all of this debris field here well let me explain the troubleshooting that I did on this there is no way in the world that a 12 year old boy would have been able to troubleshoot this on Christmas morning nor would his dad who already had a half a snoot full of some kind of Christmas eggnog or something and wasn't in the mood and now the swear words are flying and the the entire Spirit of Christmas Is Lost boy that was a funny little scenario not funny pathetic all right so what was wrong I was convinced and I was barking up the wrong tree that there was something wrong with the valve timing and I fussed around and I fussed around I made shims and you're going to see all of these little different thickness of washers that I made and each one is marked with the thickness because I have a hole box full of sterret and there's even more on the table shim stock so I made every different thickness that you can think of and took this thing apart oh dozens yeah dozens and dozens of times but not all at one setting because I got so fed up but I I was uh behind the little brass washer here I was shimming it to change the uh the valve timing and I'm not going to explain exactly what I was doing there because you probably won't understand it anyway and it didn't work so the point is moot by the way I need to put that little brass washer in here I forgot to do that because I've had this thing apart so many times but it ran fine without it didn't it so what was the problem then if that didn't do it and I still wasn't convinced that it was the valve timing so about 15 minutes ago I took the whole thing apart and I converted it back to horizontal not not the beam but the horizontal but I think I can show you best on this of what I did so I took my little uh half and half you know the morphodite hermaphrodite nobody watched that video or really got the gist of it or the humor I'm a little disappointed but I took the caliper here and I I measured the distance right here in uh wide open and closed and that that wasn't the best thing so I I actually used uh drill bits so this bit was the distance right there and when it's all the way in it was a smaller one so what did I do with that information because of this saddle casting here I wasn't actually able to transfer those Dimensions over here to the valve moving in and out because the casting is in the way you understand what I mean so I was thwarted right there so finally I deduced and this took a lot of thinking because I'm not the smartest guy in town you know so I took this off and I translated those little dimensions right here to these two little drill bits with a a bit of a tape on there as a stop which wasn't terribly effective and I proceeded to put them in here and take a measurement and it wasn't correct it is now as you can see so uh I determined that that was 25 thousandths distance that was incorrect so I took two little pieces of the 25 thousands which I probably have already lost and I'm not going to sort through all of these to tell you what that was anyway I made two little twenty five thousand thick shims and they are inserted in here in fact taped temporarily so they would stay in place as I assembled it I put it back together and I blew on it to start with I always stick this tubing here into my mouth before I go over the compressor and immediately watch this immediately I realized it's going to work that is it Eureka I finally found the answer so I fired it up as you saw that was the first firing that you saw here five minutes ago and so that was the entire problem there that the valve was not being located in the correct position inside the cylinder head and now it works but again as I said I would tell a say that if all of these are the same if they made thousands of them none of them would have worked unless uh I don't know the dad was an engineer actually whoever bought this for a child probably had an interest in himself the adult I mean and probably couldn't figure it out but not while it's in four on the floor in front of the Christmas tree and there's other presents being wrapped and just totaled chaos going on you know how it can be on a Christmas morning so that is it did you like this series of videos did you watch all four leave comments please so I know what to do here and then finally stick around for just a little bit extra credit remember when I showed you that man's picture earlier and I said who is this guy and of course nobody knew did you or did you raise your hand if you did all right thank you for watching and let's go into extra credit and I got hundreds of other videos already on YouTube and thousands more to come now here's the answer to the pop quiz and yes this is Leo bakeland the Pioneer in Plastics in fact he invented the first practical plastic in 1907 and in 1924 there he is on the cover of Time Magazine look him up in Wikipedia you will find his life to be fascinating and I must confess I was so I'm easily discouraged very easily I think I always was but I'm getting worse but if this had not worked well I probably would have fiddled around with different thicknesses because I've got all of this stock but I was at my wits end and about ready to just forget it it's a two-in-one not a three in one but boy it doesn't run great now and just that tiny little difference of 25 thousands made uh a success out of this beautiful little Miller Rancho thank you Mr Miller if you're still live no you're not there's no way you could be living but his grandson's good I almost forgot to tell you this but again I was concerned about the distance right here which I solved with shims but I spent probably 90 minutes making this little Fiasco here that is a little shorter than the dog bone right here or in fact I could make it into different lengths you see I've got a thread in there so I could make it longer and shorter than that and that was the way that I was going to compensate if this was the problem but this was so tedious and hard to work with and I had milling and Drilling and frustration so I finally gave up on that but what I could do now actually is to make another dog bone out of solid brass not like this and maybe just Square brass I don't need all the different shapes and of the correct length and that would solve the problem and would be better than these shims which will immediately be lost if this was taken apart