Lester:
Another great job in your restoration work. Anytime you say the word and send some dimensions along, I can get to work on the design of another "porcupine" boiler with modern construction.
The little governor is definitely a "real governor" and not some ornament. It also solves a question about a little governor I've had for ages. About 35 years ago, a man of advanced years called me. This was pre internet, so I think he might have found me by way of a post in "Live Steam" magazine which I once subscribed to. At any rate, the fellow wanted to find a good home for a small horizontal steam engine he'd had for most of his life. It is a horizontal engine of about 2" x 3", center crank with the connecting rod having the classic wedge-adjustable (gib and cotter ?) type brasses at each end. It had been used hard, and the man did not know all the history on it. His belief was it had been at an exposition in San Francisco in the early 20th century where it drove an exhibit of miniature factory equipment to demonstrate how guards could be applied to them. The man would not part with the miniature machines, but did sell me the engine. He said he believed the engine had spent many years in a school of some sort and was used to train stationary engineers. This was borne out by well-worn and mis-matched nuts on most of the studbolts. With the engine, separately, was a small governor. It is about 1/8" NPT, and is very similar to the Strelinger governor. The difference is this 1/8" NPT governor did not utilize a bevel or mitre gear drive, but used idler pulleys (on the governor body) to turn the round belt 90 degrees and guide it off to make the angle needed to belt off the crankshaft. The little governor had been butchered, and it has been a project I've meant to get to. It has very small diameter loose ball bearings in it, and was once nickel plated. It is a tossup whether it is a Strelinger governor or a governor off a "popcorn" steam engine. Either way, I figure it is a winter project to see what I can do with the little governor.
Funny thing about your engine with the governor and reverse gear: until you mentioned getting it coupled to a boat propellor, I imagined it as being the just the engine to drive a ceiling fan. Running on shop air with a governor and reverse linkage, it would be belted to a ceiling fan. The governor would protect the engine in case the belt to the fan broke, and the Stephenson's link motion would let you reverse the fan depending on the time of the year. My wife saw a bottle frame steam engine recently, and said she liked the lines of it. Everyone should have a wife like mine. I told her my idea of building another model engine, this one a bottle frame vertical, to drive a ceiling fan in my office. She thinks that is a great idea.
To digress, I've loved steam engines since I was a tiny boy of maybe 4 years of age and first saw a Skinner Unaflow engine at work. At some point in my childhood, my parents took a trip to Lancaster County, PA with me. They went to a woodworking shop owned and run by a man whose last name was Ebersoll (sp ?). Ebersoll was a kindly Amishman. He showed us around his shop and my parents bought a small child's chair and foot stool for me from him and another chair for the house. Ebersoll took us up into his office, and on the wall over his desk, he had a shelf with some steam engine models he'd built from castings. A small horizontal model engine was connected to shop air, and when he cracked the valve, the engine drove the movement from a music box. I was immediately hooked. We stayed in touch with Mr. Ebersoll, and it was he who introduced me to the Stuart Turner line of model engine castings.
Ebersoll, being Amish, could not use electricity in his woodworking shop. He had taken an old horizontal boiler and was using it as a compressed air receiver, and had a diesel driven compressor to charge it up. He ran his shop on compressed air. He said it had been steam powered up until a short while before my parents and I met him. Ebersoll wore bib overalls, wire-rimmed glasses and had a long white beard. Biblical quotes were on his wall, and as a little boy, I was struck by his kindliness and gentleness aside from being instantly hooked on his shop and its overall atmosphere. At about that same point in time, I was learning about concept of death, and was being told how I'd been named for a grandfather who had died about 5 years before I was born. I was told the kind of things mothers and grandmothers tell little boys about such matters, how the soul lives on when the earthly body of a person dies, and began to wonder where heaven was, whether my grandfather was there, and what it was like. I was told he'd been a farmer and craftsman, someone who loved animals and was a kind and gentle man, and how he'd have loved me.
One rainy day, to relieve boredom, Mom sent me up into our attic to poke around. The attic was unfinished, and I could hear the rain on the roof and the smells of dust and the rough sawn lumber our house was framed with were always in the air in the attic. I got to thinking and imagining, and finally decided that Mr. Ebersoll was God or at least a Prophet, given depictions little children were given of God and the Prophets. I then decided Ebersoll's shop was heaven. As things spun out in my mind, I imagined Ebersoll and his crew made new bodies for new children out of the clean, fresh smelling wood and souls that were waiting for a body were fitted into them. I decided heaven had to be in Ebersoll's shop with its steam engines and flapping leather belts and fresh smells of lumber being milled, and Ebersoll was as good a man as any to preside over the hereafter. To this day, I sometimes return to that childish vision of heaven, a place with kindly men in overalls and wire rimmed spectacles, with lineshafting and flapping belts driven by a steam engine, with the clean fresh smell of milled lumber in the air. As the years passed, this vision always stuck with me, though as I came into the machinist trade and became an engineer, the smell of the heaven I imagined tended to be tinged with the aromas of hot steam cylinder oil and sulphur cutting oil rather than milled lumber.
I've always meant to honor the memory and example Mr. Ebersoll set for me by putting a model engine on a wall bracket to do some sort of "useful work". Rather than have it drive a music box or similar, a ceiling fan seems more practical. Of course, to drive a ceiling fan, having a means of reversing rotation of the fan in winter or summer is a necessity. Easier than re-pitching the blades. Your little bottle frame marine engine with its governor has pretty much awakened the old images of Mr. Ebersoll and so much else for me. Sweet memories and nice visions, for sure, and for this I thank you.
