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I was pottering around on the web looking at the stranger things Lima has made over the years, and looking at some of the engines, I wonder what were they thinking?Take the shay for example. Sometimes they look like a flatcar with a boiler and oil tank on them.Or better yet, the wonderfully odd T boiler. Someone figured that by using two boilers (one verticle, one horizontal) and welding them together, you could get more steam out of a smaller engine.Though, I'll give them this, some of those engines were really powerful, even for their small size. I've found pictures of a small 20 ton loco pulling sixteen loaded coal cars. Needless to say, I was shocked.Odd though, you'd think the design would have caught on. (Now, can you guess what I'm making?)
RE: What was Lima thinking?, philmoberg, Jun-16-03, 08:56 PM, (1) RE: What was Lima thinking?, Magick_maker, Jun-16-03, 09:11 PM, (2) RE: What was Lima thinking?, timken, Jun-16-03, 11:49 PM, (3) RE: What was Lima thinking?, Magick_maker, Jun-17-03, 06:22 PM, (6) RE: What was Lima thinking?, Jonatan, Jun-17-03, 04:09 AM, (4) RE: What was Lima thinking?, Magick_maker, Jun-17-03, 06:18 PM, (5)
I s'pose it's the sort of thing that happens when their engineering staff didn't know there was a box to be thought outside of ... Keep hunting: there are stranger things yet to be discovered from the days when the object of the game was designing around the other guy's patent ... the Climax and Heisler designs are probably the best-known examles of this phenomenon, though not the most bizarre.I'm looking forward to your latest project, as always. You've got quite a range of machinery to choose from this time. -Phil
The very first shay engines were built on a modified flat car. Designed by Ephram Shay, and built by a local machine shop who's work he thought highly of, Lima. These were their first venture into locomotives, and he sold them the rights to produce them. They turned out a high quality product, and the Shay caught on in the logging and mining industries quite quickly. The T boiler was designed to make a round firebox, which was much stronger and didn't require as many stay bolts. It's limitation, was that the width of the engine limited the size of the firebox and grate area. So, it was only useful on very small engines.Remember, back in the 1880's, locomotive designes were pretty well limited to stuff designed for regular trackwork, mostly 4-4-0's and 4-6-0's. These did not work well on the light track and temporary spurs of logging lines. Nobody knew how to build something that was high powered, very flexible, and could run on very light rail (15-30 pound per yard, with todays mainlines mostly using 133lb. per yard steel. This was an era of experimentation, and the Shay was very successful.
One thing I did find out was the verticle boiler is actually better than the horizontal in some ways. The most obvious being that it didn't take up as much space. Also, if you think about it, there was less chance for crown sheet failure since the water was always over it.I've finished the T style, and I think I'm going to retrofit it as a verticle boiler engine as well. That means I'll need to rebuild the boiler, move the fuel tank, and the cab. Bout 2 hours work.
It's done, I'm just making the crank rods line up right. Currently, on sharp curves, the crank breaks. I don't like that I should have it fixed, but now I need to make the couplers and the eng file work. as it stands, my whistle fx is non existant, my smoke is like half a foot to the right of where it should be, and a few other minor problems. I'll have pics once I add the couplers tonight.
