Chuck's Steam Engine

Chuck said:

Dear Bullpen Readers,

The steam engine depicts a real engine I salvaged from near-death at the hands of a scrapper.  I restored to it's full glory.  It served time in northern California in the 1850's driving a saw and later as a gold stamping machine.  They called it a bottle engine but I thought it imitated a woman's figure far better. It started out an unsightly ball of rust but when I finished my labor of love, steam once again passed thru it's chambers turning heat energy into motive force ....A wonderful thing!

...she is a sexy little lady, Chuck, I gotta admit...irresistable in her own way

 

My heart strings were plucked,  but I sold this piece for the expressed purpose of purchasing a Mac and PowerCADD/ WildTools.  Blowing the steam whistle on a cold winters day, listening to my engine puff and chug with magical simplicity shooting steam rings high into the air, drawing kids and adults from all over was fun! .... Using PowerCADD and WildTools is just as  fun ... and productive$$.

Keep in mind this was my first effort at animation.  I did it for the shear fun of it!  Had a blast and learned alot. I drew the general steam engine with a piston, piston rod, crosshead, connecting rod, and crank etc.   Each moving piece was layered.  The center of the pivot points were assigned a snap point and grouped.   I brought a reference line over for the vertical to make for easy snapping.   In the days of steam, much to-doing was made over bore and stroke.  A wide bore is powerful but unstable.  A long stroke meant longer power application but slow turning while a short stroke tended to waste steam.  I think the bore should equal the stroke.  I enjoyed part of this history and geometry simply trying keep the piston from blowing out the top of the head or sucking itself below the packing gland.   Try an animation yourself.  Some funny surprises are in store.  It was easy to make the necessary changes to make things work. The Move Tool is so cool for creating animation's.  It is too easy.  Snap...snap.  As the crank rotates, the connecting rod moves AND rotates.  The WildTools Rotate Tool allows you to rotate the part from it's connection on the crank and bring the other end to the reference line.  Fun and easy. The crosshead, (The connection point between the connecting rod and the piston rod) is brought to the connecting rod and the piston simply takes care of itself.  Once you start rotating the crank everything follows along.  It is easy to see if something is out of alignment due to the snap points located in the center of the bearing surfaces. Initially, I made a drawing Save-as of each 15 degree crank movements thru 360°, saving each file to Quicktime Pro as a .pict in a folder.  Later, I learned a bizarre phenomenon occurs.  I think it has to do with 60 cycles of the monitor screen or frames per minute or too much beer.  Quicktime showed the movie progressing but the flywheel  appeared to remain frozen.   The sliding D-valve moved but not the flywheel.  Broken key?? Huh?  Hmmmmmm?  The original flywheel had six spokes so that is how I drew it.  My scientific mind suggested removing a spoke ...Viola!  ...  I had my motion:-)  It  looks to me like it is spinning faster than the crank but I assure you ... It is a fig newton of your imagination. Each file needs a consecutive number AFTER the file name and before the .mov!  Not a Quicktime expert, this simple kernel of knowledge took me a full day to learn.  The actual drawing took about two hours.   I think I had 22 files. i.e. ...engine1.pict; engine2.pict engine3.pict etc.  This was way too many. It seems an odd number of files runs better than an even number of files due to the freezing effect of the rotating flywheel.  What is shown is four frames running at an odd number of frames per second .... 13, I believe.  I would never do another animation involving rotating parts unless it contained an odd number of frames.  I.E., 3, 5, 7 etc..Also -- make sure all drawings are on the same size page.

Experiment...it is a great way to prove out a linkage!

...the Bull is wondering, did Chuck really say he sold this beauty so he could buy PowerCADD?!!