wow, that's some undertaking. Most everyone crawls before they walk. You went to the high wire and then to the trapeze. Holy smokes.
Excellent work, pics, and thanks for taking us through.
I guess you don't need the apprenticeship... just went straight to journeyman.
It is a brutal way to learn how to make and engine, and I had limited time to work on it since I work full time.
I was often tied up with work stuff for a year, and so I had a lot of delays, which really strung out the work.
I think it was about six years to get it all done, but as I mentioned with some long gaps where I could not work on it.
I tried to make a few simple little wobbler steam engine parts as part of a group build before this, and I thoroughly botched my parts.
I had to send out botched parts to the other group members, and they were not happy.
Only one guy was able to salvage his engine and get it to run.
My parts were ruined, and so all I learned from that first attempt was to make badly botched parts.
You have to fail in order to learn though, and success is much sweeter with the journey is difficult.
I really love the backyard casting hobby, and I never thought I would master casting gray iron.
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