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Constructing a Burrell Showman's Engine
- words by the late Chris Hunt.
My inspiration to build a 2" scale model of a 'Burrell Showman's Engine' resulted from a visit to Paignton Regatta in 1990, where the ex Anderton & Rowland engine 'Dragon' was working, along with their 98 key 'Marenghi Scenic Organ'.
'Dragon' was one of the largest Showman's engines in use prior to World War Two. The engine is a double crank compound of 8 n.h.p. which would equate to about 70 b.h.p in modern terms.
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The drawings and castings for the 'Thetford Town', have been available from Reeves (2000) for many years, and whilst the castings are generally of good quality, I felt the drawings lacked some detail, and contained some errors.
To overcome some of these problems I visited the 'Museum of Country Life' at Exmouth, where the full size Burrell engine 'Gladiator' is on display, and took numerous photographs and measurements.
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Much of this concerned details such as the rear wheels, particularly rivet spacing and sizes.
I consider it is probably essential for anyone considering building a similar model to do the same, until the drawings have been updated.
I hope this series of photographs and comments may be of interest, and assistance to future builders of what is an outstanding model.
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I have always found, when building a traction engine, it best to start with the wheels, and this is where I had problems with the castings. I found it impossible to machine the Reeves' supplied rear wheel rims on a Myford ML7 lathe.
To overcome this problem, I used the rims supplied by MJ Engineering for their Fowler A7 engine.
These were first cut in half, and an aluminium strip was inserted between the resulting "Tee" pieces to bring the wheel out to the required width. Following that, an aluminium Tie ring was inserted between the Tee rings to hold the whole lot together in the normal way.
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On the outside of the wheel, strakes were riveted on in addition to a thin aluminium plate to accept the rubber tyres.
The horn plates as fitted to the boiler are 3mm thick, not 3/16" as shown on the the plans.
This not only makes it easier to form the near side plate, but is also more to scale, and perfectly adequate.
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The crankshaft is basically 'built-up', using loctite and taper pins, as normal pratice. However the Burrell has splines on the 'offside' for the gearing.
Although the splines can be be milled from the solid, I found the easiest way was to mill 8 x 3/32" slots into the end of the shaft, and then silver solder the keys inserted into the resultant slots using silver solder foil.
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