Regulating madness

Fellow reader, lend me your ears!.... Mine seem to have gone missing!

Well thts today's bad joke out the way I can get down to business, It's been a hard few weeks really, and I possably haven't spent as much time in the workshop as I possably should have. Things are getting done but not as fast as I may like, First and foremost, Pug is back in bits, after the snow test some issues cropped up so I have been working on that fairly hard, if you havent seen the video, go have a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK2NFSuR9Vc

First thing was a new regulator valve, the old one was on its last legs, leaked and didn't open all the way so I got a replacement for that. One of the other major issues I was battling was priming, water ontop of the firebox being thrown into the steam T and the thrown down the blower pipe, injector pipe, whistle, you name it! So after some consideration and a set of original full size pug drawings I have made a modification, the steam T now has a tube screwed into the bottom that runs inside the boiler and up the steam dome, takeing it's steam from a higher point should help a lot!

This also means we can run it with more than half a boiler of water without fear it's gunna get thrown up into the smoke box via the blower or thrown out the whistle or down the injector feed. So thats all sorted now I'm getting the regulator sorted, not only am I replaceing the valve, I'm shorting the rod and tidying up the back head a little, So this week will see the bushes and such on the lathe to take some length off them so the whole unit sits closer to the boiler makeing a little more room on the foot plate and fireing should be easier. Other issues I've addressed is getting the lubricator to throw more oil in, this I achieved fairly simply, the axle pumps were looked at again and I found the leak and fixed that, general work like tightening up the glands, hopefully all this will make a marked difference in performance, every time it runs it gets a little better, so with some luck this trend should turn out a good little engine,

Well thats about all the news .. nothing massivly exciting i know but its more progress, but ill carry on slogging with it unitll it works as well as i can get it