Recent News!

(22nd February 2008)

Leta and I attended our first Pig War Encampment at Garrison Bay, San Juan Island, this last August, as Colonel and Mrs. Richard Moody, commandant of the Royal Engineers in British Columbia at the time of the original 1859 standoff. We had a wonderful time! The event was a smashing success, and my men and I had the honour of attending Ms. Mary Gilbert, the current British Deputy Consul General to the Western United States, as our special guest. Here is a photo of me and Clint Cannon as Admiral Baynes, British commander in chief in the Pacific, flanking Mary at the ceremonials. It was a memorable weekend and we made some great new friends. If you are interested, I have made a special page with more of our photos from that event and other historical reenacting.

Over the years, quite a few people have tried to replicate this condensate pump of superior (but complicated!) design from the old US Navy steam cutters of the Great White Fleet era, for use in modern steam launches. At least one set of workable but somewhat simplified patterns is still floating around for the smaller Model G pump. The pump we attempted, at the request of a customer, is the larger pump used on the 50 hp model M engines in the 40 foot cutters. It is basically identical in design and detail to the smaller one, only with longer stroke and consequently longer pump body and base. To my knowledge, no one has reproduced this style pump in precisely the shape and design as the original blueprints. In every case I have seen, noticable shortcuts and design changes were introduced to make the job simpler to accomplish. We wanted ours to be as close the original Navy blueprints as possible. The following photo of our 1907 print shows the internal complexity of the pump body, with its three internal interlocking cored chambers.

A month and a half of full-time head-scratching and patternmaking produced a full set of sixteen separate patterns and seven core boxes. All patternwork was traditional, in mahogany and sugar pine, although the cores were made mostly in heat bonded resin-coated sand. Here are the patterns and principle cores laid out to be photographed:

Below, engineer and steam engine expert Keith Sternberg (on left) and I discuss the three interlocking pump body cores here assembled to be inserted in the mould:

We were apprehensive about the initial bronze heat due to the complexity of the pump body mould and cores, and thus the expense of a mistake; but we were gratified to have the very first one we poured turn out fine!

It was downhill from then on, with the other parts accumulated in subsequent heats and the machine work proceeding smoothly. In another five weeks of full time work, we had a finished pump:

Only very minor changes distinguish it from the original, and most of these were at the request of the customer. The flanges are threaded for normal 1 in. NPT pipe instead of the old brazed copper pipe. The valves have high-temp silicon O-rings inset into their faces to quieten their action rather than the metal-to-metal contact of the navy pumps. And stainless steel studs and nuts were used in most places, as well as a stainless steel piston rod. Also, the crosshead pin was increased in size from 7/16 in. to 1/2 in. for increased durability. A challenging but fun and rewarding project; and we at Marshall Machine and Engineering are very proud to have succesfully completed this commission. Anyone with an interest in these pumps and their construction is welcome to contact us here at Marshall Machine Works or Capt. Keith Sternberg with questions.

I have continued over the years to save older computers whenever I run across them, and I was shocked this last winter to see how badly things had gotten out of hand! I have almost seventy machines now! What a packrat! Most are CP/M rigs like CompuPro/Godbout, KayPro, Columbia Data, NorthStar, Morrow, etc. There are some rarities among the pile. I have a Seattle Computer Products S-100 machine called a Gazelle which many people have never heard of. It is a shame it is so unknown as it is a truly historic computer. It was one of the first 8086 computers and was the actual computer which Tim Patterson wrote DOS for. Micro$oft bought the rights to DOS from Tim's company afterwards, the Gazelle was discontinued, and the rest is history. It is a huge computer by modern standards, so large that it has casters on the cabinet for moving it! Twin 8 in. floppy drives. I also have some curious single board computers with a very early processor on them, the RCA 1802. This was the processor which powered the Voyager Space Probe! The instruction set for this chip is not too difficult to learn, and I have been teaching myself to program it for various little CNC projects. The boards are rather small, only 6 in. long, with both a serial and parallel port. Let's see, what else? Daughter Wendy has just graduated from Western Washington University with very high marks. She studied geophysics and thoroughly enjoyed her college years. We are very proud of her academic achievements! And here is the final member of the family, Malcolm, relaxing by the fireside after a hard day of terrorizing the entire household.

Some years ago, we bundled our foundry CD with the cupola furnace book and the response has been very favourable. We had lots of colour photos, CAD drawings, and other neat foundry related stuff which we had accumulated and were not able to put into the book for one reason or another. A CD seemed to be the answer to getting this info out to the readers at an economic price. A CD is a bit cheaper to produce than the printed book, even though it can hold many times as much material. To get around cross platform issues, I formated the entire CD as a gigantic website, so any machine with a web browser can access the information (no actual connection to the Internet required). Because it is CD-based and not an actual web site which you have to download over a modem line, the pictures can be much larger and finer resolution due to the CD being so much faster. I think it is a great bargain, a goldmine of info for anyone interested in home foundry work and casting iron. We can now accept PayPal for payment! Our overseas customers will appreciate this. And this is a Premiere PayPal account so you do not need to sign up for PayPal yourself to buy from us; you can use your MasterCard or VISA direct thru my secure PayPal BuyNow link from almost anywhere in the World. Just click the Buy Now button next to the Book and CD Bundle Offer.

I am clearing out some old stuff left over from before I retired from commercial foundry work and have added some neat glass and bronze deck lite prisms, repro engine labels, etc. to a separate page of misc. stuff for sale. Check it out!

In 1998, we finished a 16 in. bore cupola based on two 55-gallon oil barrels. I cut the top barrel down to less than full height, so the cupola is a bit shorter than I would have desired, but I wanted it to be portable to some extent. I found a blower brand new and on sale, at Grizzly Imports, for $139.95. It was intended as a portable dust collector for woodworking. I enlarged the blower intake to the same diameter as the discharge, for maximum efficiency. This furnace is able to tap approximately 100 to 130 lbs. of iron every 10 to 12 minutes; and we have fully described it on our new CD mentioned above.

Stewart & Leta Currie-Marshall, 2008