Category Archives: CK Holliday build

With the steam, exhaust ports, cylinder, and steam chest seat modeled, now we have to consider the size and motion of the slide valve, which will regulate the steam admission into the cylinder.

Meyer talks about this extensively (mostly about relating the motion of slide valve to the eccentrics), but the subject can be compressed into the following three “rules”:

1: “Steam must be admitted into the cylinder at one of its ends only
at one time.”

Below is a cross section through the cylinder and the slide valve. The blue solid is the slide valve. Its arc in the middle is the exhaust cavity. The two tubes curving out left and right are the steam ports, terminating at each end of the cylinder. The trapezoidal cavity in the middle is the exhaust.

Ok! Let’s take a look at the slide valve motion:

The first picture shows the 2 “legs” of the valve covering up both steam ports. The second shows the slide valve at its extreme travel (exact distance is not known yet, since I haven’t designed the eccentrics), exposing only 1 steam port (left) while covering the other. Looks like the slide valve meets rule 1.

2: “The valve must allow the steam to escape from one end of the
cylinder, at least as soon as it is admitted into the other end of the cylinder.”

To satisfy this rule, the distance between the inner face of the valve’s legs must satisfy the following equation:

distance = 2 x Width(bridge) + Width(exhaust)

Plugging in the “as-virtually-built” measurements:

2*(0.625) + 1.25 = 2.5in

The picture below shows the measurement of this distance satisfying the 2.5in rule.

What this means visually is that the valve should allow the steam at one end of the cylinder be evacuated (via the exhaust cavity and port) before allowing the steam to enter the other end of the cylinder. This is important to eliminate backpressuring the piston.

The picture below shows that the left steam port would be exhausted before the steam is admitted into the right side. Looks like this rule is satisfied!

3: “The valve must cover the steam ports so as not to allow the
steam to escape from the steam chest into the exhaust port.”

This rule is satisfied when the exhaust cavity is not greater than the length given in the above equation. As you can see, it is not! So, this rule too is satisfied.

Visually, in any of the pictures above we can see that at no time can the steam from the chest escape into the exhaust.

So, indeed, the slide valve satisfies all three rules!

With the left-side of the saddle made, it then gets copied over to the right side. There’s a bit of tweaking involved since the cylinder has a 1 degree tilt, so both sides are not complete “mirror” of each other. Like everything so far in this project, that would make it too easy!

As shown above, the saddles are bolted together at the centerline, completing the “cradle” that will receive the boiler later. The saddles are bolted to the frames just inboard of the cylinder. They can be seen in the see-through section below, along with the piping in the casting.

Here’s comparing the layout to Lingenfleter’s:

Pretty close!

The half-saddle is fairly complete now. From the outside it doesn’t look like much. There is a half-cradle for the boiler (smokebox), a bolt-tab at fore and aft to receive the other half of the saddle, and steam/exhaust ports.

With the x-ray vision, changes are more obvious.

The cast connecting the boiler to the cylinder has 3 ports running through it: the exhaust port in the middle, straddled by 2 steam pipe on either side.

The front view above shows the 3 ports running from the inboard end, curving down and running outside, and up again terminating at the cylinder.

The side view above shows the ports lay out. What looks like 2 “eyes” are the steam pipe, and the “nose” in the middle is the exhaust.

For comparison purposes, here’s a cross-section plan I referenced, taken from Meyer.

In Fig 13, label “J” marks the steam pipe, and “K” the exhaust.

Much of the time I spent making this part was just trying to visualize what is happening inside the cylinder and casting. Before CAD was invented, these old plans try to compress as much information as possible into few drawings. The practice these days is to have many drawings to communicate the idea, since producing drawings is much easier now.

And of course, they did not make 3d sections either.

But when everything is drafted correctly, it’s quite obvious! Here’s my 3d section through the middle of the saddle. In this section, the exhaust port is shown. Compare its similarity to Meyer’s Fig 13 above.

And below is a section through the 3 ports at the cradle. The middle is the exhaust. The long pipe above it splits the incoming steam pipe into 2 branches, terminating at fore and aft of the cylinder, supplying the steam to the steam chest.

After a long day of modeling and figuring out sweeps and lofts, I finally sketched in the 2 steam ports and 1 exhaust port.

The outline of the ports can be seen in this see-through. The steam ports are fore and aft, with partial horizontal passage.

The front view of the saddle shows the exhaust port originating from the steam chest seat to the inboard center of the saddle (left to right in following picture).

Nothing about this was simple! The exhaust pipe has multiple cross-section shapes, and very organic curves. Both of the steam and exhaust ports are probably a bit of simplification, but given that the CK Holliday itself is a model, the real engine probably has the same “feature”.

This solids rendering shows the recesses of the ports, and the tappings waiting to receive the steamchest.

Last time I posted about using a table from Meyer to determine the steam port area. This can also be done from an equation: fractional steam port area = speed of piston in feet per minute X 0.1/600.

To demonstrate this, I updated the steam port worksheet to run the above equation:

Although the DLR runs at about 10mph, I decided to calculate at 15mph to give the engine a bit more headroom. At 15mph the required steam port area is 4.583 sq. in. I’ve chose a 7.5″x0.625″ steam port which equals to an area of 4.213 sq. in. (with semi-circular ends). The 7.5″ length was determined from Meyer’s suggestion that the length of the port be no less than 3/4 X cylinder diameter, so the rest is figuring out the width, which is actually a quadratic equation due to the semi-circular ends.

At 10mph the actual port area is 3.056 sq. in.

So for the chosen steam port size of 7.5″x0.625″ should be able to work for at least 10mph. Let’s see what the exact optimum speed for this sized port will be:

Most of today’s work was spent revising the saddle and cylinder dimensions and alignments. Rough checks were made from scaling the Lingenfelter’s drawing.

Then, since the guts of the CK Holliday’s cylinder, steam chest, and valve gear are not known. So, to model these details accurately, I had to “re-engineer” the engine some what. Hopefully I follow the same “track” (haha!) as Walt did when building the engine in 1955.

The DLRR line normally travels at 10mph around the park. I assumed 15mph just to have some margins. With some engineering (they’re really just geometry calculations) we can figure out the speed of the sliding valve, knowing that the engine has a 10″x15″ cylinder.

Then, use the table from Meyer to get the steam port size. From the table below, at 350 fpm, the steam port size is 0.058. Plug this value in cell E10, and we get steam port area of 4.55+ sq. in.

Don’t forget to tweak the numbers a little bit to make the dimensions machinable.

And here’s a rough sketching of the steam port on the steam chest seat.

Minor revisions to the cylinder’s dimension.

Started sketching out the half-saddle casting.

Look carefully and you can see the 1 degree rear tilt on the cylinder. This minor tilt allows condensed steam (water!) at the bottom of the cylinder to flow out of the rear cylinder cock. This ensures that there is no trapped water in the cylinder that can cause damage to the assembly.

Rough fitting the half saddle onto the frame:

The 10″x15″ cylinder is made with 3/4″ bolts “caps” at each ends.

The front and rear caps are temporarily identical. The rear cap is of course supposed to receive/host the valve gear hardware.

A lot of work to do for this part, because the cylinder will be “made” with half-saddle as cast-in-one as it is the common practice in fabrication (and therefore presumably the CK Holliday was built following the same practice).

The 5.5″ driver axles are fitted into the axle boxes. Its dimensions are somewhat temporary until other parts (wheels) are fitted. The forward axle is temporarily identical to the aft axle right now until the eccentrics are fitted.

Here’s the frame compared to the original drawing: