On Friday, August 18, I went to the Maumee Valley Antique Steam & Gas show east of New Haven, Indiana. Among the things I saw were some made in Ohio.

 

 

 

 

If you're so inclined, click here to see more.

 

 

 

 

wow rob, just wow. now that was a cool thread link. i esp love those photo threads like that where you feel like you were there walking around.

 

the old marion huber tractor was a nice piece of machinery.

the canadian cockshutt tractor? lol!

stream trains and blacksmiths and hotrods and walleye too, what a show.

 

 

The Maumee Valley show is rather small compared to some, but there's a good variety of equipment and constant activity. The best-known shows mostly take place Labor Day weekend at Pontiac, Illinois; Mount Pleasant, Iowa; and Rollag, Minnesota. The last two of those are absolutely mind-boggling for the amount, variety, and scale of some of the exhibits. Rollag has more operating gigantic industrial gas engines and steam engines than anyplace else in North America, in addition to a commercial-size steam sawmill, a standard-gauge steam railroad, construction equipment, and a village of nineteenth-century homes and businesses.

 

Mount Pleasant features, in addition to the agricultural exhibits, a pioneer log village, a working streetcar line with historic trolleys, a narrow-gauge steam railroad and operating large industrial steam engines. It's the second largest-attendance event in Iowa, next to the state fair (although RAGBRAI is gaining ground!).

 

Another wonderful show takes place in late summer at Irricana, Alberta, just a few miles east of Calgary. The horse-powered farming demonstrations are probably my favorite part of that show; they harvest a field of wheat with a binder pulled by horses, thresh the wheat with a steam engine, and then plow the harvested field with horses. There's big steam, early gas tractors, and a lot of beautiful, huge draft horses -- Belgians, Percherons, etc.

 

Like most American manufacturers, Huber suspended production of civilian goods during World War II in order to produce military hardware. After the war, they never resumed tractor production. So far as I know, they still produce construction machinery. Huber steam engines and tractors always had a reputation for quality. Even the early tractors, with their tall, spindly-looking front wheels, were very good, reliable machines. They were assembled from purchased components; many farm equipment makers of the era did that as gas tractor technology reached the point where it was affordable and usable for farmers who had never been able to afford or use large, expensive, heavy steam engines.

 

The Huber Light Four, sold around 1918, was built from a chassis and transmission purchased from Foote Brothers Gear Company, an engine purchased from Waukesha, and a Perfex brass cellular-core radiator. At least three other companies that I can think of, Massey-Harris, Parret and Frick, all used the Foote Brothers chassis, and some even used the Waukesha engine. Waukesha engines in varying sizes were popular choices for builders of many kinds of machines, from farm tractors to motor trucks to construction equipment.

 

</babble>  :roll:

 

  Do you know if there are any steam engines built today, other than hobby and demonstration models?

 

  I have read that they still use steam driven pile drivers, though I wouldn't know one if I saw it. Of course, steam is still used for heating, cleaning, etc.

 

   Do you know if there are any steam engines built today, other than hobby and demonstration models?

 

   I have read that they still use steam driven pile drivers, though I wouldn't know one if I saw it. Of course, steam is still used for heating, cleaning, etc.

 

I don't know if anyone is still building steam turbines for electric power or marine applications. Probably they are, because steam is still the medium used for nuclear power; reactors provide heat to boil water to generate high-pressure steam, which spins a turbine.

 

Piston-engine production pretty much ended after World War II, and most large ships built as steamers but still in service have been refitted with diesel engines. I think Norfolk & Western still built steam locomotives at Roanoke, VA., until 1950 because of their stake in the coal business; their J-class streamlined passenger engines were quite sleek and elegant, and could crank out 110mph on a straightaway with a fairly heavy train.

 

The last big industrial piston-engine installation I know of was in a gas pipeline compressor station in West Virginia around 1947, a massive project involving 16 2000-horsepower Corliss tandem compound engines with 60-inch-diameter low-pressure cylinders, plus all the supporting equipment. I saw that station in operation in the 1960s, when it wasn't expected to run much longer because of escalating water-treatment costs due to mine runoff in the river that it drew from.

 

Skinner Engine Works, in Erie, Pennsylvania, built very large piston engines for steamships, and I think they completed their last order around 1961. My parents and I made a night crossing on one of the Chesapeake Bay car ferries shortly before the bridge opened, and Dad and I found our way to the engine room where two 900-horsepower Skinner engines were working.

 

If you can find a copy of End of an Era - The Last of the Great Lakes Steamers, by David Plowden, you'll see some beautiful black-and-white photos of steam freighters, their machinery, and the men who ran them.

 

Any surviving steam pile drivers would probably be barge-mounted for maritime applications, building bridges, docks, etc., where weight and transportation wouldn't be a problem and there's a need for a lot of power. Most of the ones used on land-based construction are powered by compressed air or by a direct-acting diesel cylinder, but the big steam rigs are still unexcelled in their ability to deliver massive blows in rapid succession. In 1960 I saw one in Wisconsin, built in 1901, that could strike 100 blows per minute with a seven-ton hammer.

 

A steam pile driver houses its boiler in a barn-like structure with a short smokestack projecting from the roof maybe 3 to 6 feet. At one end of the structure there's a tower that could be up to 100 feet tall (it folds down for transport). Two rails run vertically up the tower, and the hammer assembly slides up and down between them, raised and lowered by a steam hoist located in the boiler house.

 

The hammer assembly consists of a vertical, double-acting (can exert force alternately in either direction) steam cylinder. Beneath the steam cylinder is an iron weight, or hammer, of several tons, suspended from the steam cylinder's piston rod. A steel or iron cap, or saddle, is placed over the top of the steel or wood pile to protect it from fraying or splitting, and the pile is hoisted vertically between the tower rails, beneath the hammer. The steam cylinder lifts the hammer a few feet and then slams it down on top of the pile, repeating the action rapidly and following the top of the pile down as it sinks into the ground. You can feel the vibration in the ground for quite a ways around when a large pile driver is working.

 

A diesel pile driver usually is used in conjunction with a conventional construction crane, and the cylinder blows copious amounts of foul black smoke. A steam pile driver emits puffs of steam from the cylinder with each stroke. Compressed-air pile drivers don't emit anything visible.