Wheeled stationary steam engine with generator (Steam Fairground)

A working wheeled steam-powered model of a fairground stationary steam engine with front-mounted (non-working) electrical generator. This is part of the Steam Fairground set that was donated to the museum in 2015.

Details

The piece is a fat-boilered stationary steam engine fitted to a base with four wheels, a pair of medium-sized rear wheels with diagonal grip-treads, and a smaller pair of front wheels on a swivelling axle. The engine's mechanism is not' designed to be able to drive its own wheels, and is instead meant to be towed behind a traction engine.

The engine has a top-mounted piston driving a flywheel, and there's a small space on the base in front of the engine where a small electrical generator is mounted, horizontally, to be driven by a band connected to the engine's flywheel.

The generator itself is a "dummy" with fake electrical contacts – the fake generator's four electrical stators, visible form each side, appear to actually be a couple of repurposed "die" tools normally used for cutting threads onto metal rods.

Internal workings

The engine has a roof supported by a pillar in each of the base's four corners - this roof lifts and pivots on one of the rods, so that the chimney can be removed for refilling with water (the removable chimney has since been lost). The boiler has a double-wall, with an large internal space for the burner, and the water heated in the space between the inner and outer walls.