As with a lot of my engine designs they start with the flywheel and in this case a cast iron flywheel that was machined from solid. This flywheel was first installed on my oscillating steam engine and then moved to the transitional engine.
Once I had turned the basic shape of the flywheel I mounted it onto the rotary table.
The rotary table is tiny and quite frankly is lost below the flywheel.
However, the first job is to centre the flywheel on the rotary table. Here I’m using a DTi to establish the position of the flywheel as I rotate the table.
I rotated the table 60° at a time and drilled the holes at the root of the space between the webs.
The six holes start to show the form of what is to come. I had to be very careful even drilling these holes as the table is not providing much support.
Once the holes and the outer arcs were machined I could remove the flywheel from the rotary table as everything from now on was straight lines.
Milling the straight lines after some careful setup. As you can see I machined both sides of the webs at each setup as this gave me parallel sided spokes.
There is something about the design at this stage that is rather pleasing.
The machined flywheel after some simple cleaning up. The intention was to make a square formed chunky flywheel and that is exactly what this has turned out as.
The final 4 inch diameter and 1 inch wide cast iron flywheel. Painted and with a fixing grub screw.
Finally an image of the transitional engine with the cast iron flywheel in place on the crankshaft.
