First, I am not an expert by any sense of the word. These are some of
my observations made while kit-bashing my Ruby. I have superheated my Ruby
conversion (Rosey) with a single straight piece of stainless steel tubing
through the flue. I tried a four turn coil but had a lot of difficulty
getting the fire lit and keeping it going. Kevin O'Connor (sp?) used a coil
in his that seemed to work very well, so I don't know what my problem was. I
do not have any method to determine how much superheating takes place but I
do know by observation that the superheater tube in mine gets cherry red when
the fire is lit. I also added a boiler jacket and insulated all the exposed
steam lines with cotton string. My last run at Diamondhead lasted over 30
minutes by keeping the speed down and the fire low.
As for the lubricator. I noted in earlier runs that I was not using
very much steam oil on each run. Less than 1/4 of the lubricator was filled
with water. I enlarged the hole in the steam line slightly to increase the
amount of oil and still use less than half. One observation I made at DH was
that the gentleman who was running the 100 year old steam engines had no
lubricator at all. All lubrication was by the water/condensation in the
cylinders. This brings me to the conclusion that most lubricators in there
present form provide adequate lubrication. Those with more knowledge (and
there are a lot of those) may correct me in my thinking, but I am inclined to
believe that not a lot of oil is required for adequate lubrication even with
superheated steam. Time will tell if I destroy the cylinders on Rosey for
lack of lubrication.
Salty
