This week I spent some time simplifying the oscillating engine that I made some years. The goal being to make a more elegant design that I could produce in CAD.
The oscillating engine started life as a project to build on my then new Warco WM240B lathe.
It ran briefly as a simple oscillating engine with a very large flywheel, before it was modified into a geared oscillating engine.
The gearing works well, but it’s noisy. Plus not that easy to make, in fact I bought these gears in a job lot on ebay.
The 4″ diameter disk of cast iron was 15mm thick. I roughed this out to size and machined the 6 slots – Making a Flywheel.
At this point the spokes were roughly 6mm square with sharp corners.
The spokes were rounded using a belt of emery cloth pulled through the spokes by hand. When machining the Burrell flywheel I documented this process. As these spokes were quite a bit larger those on the Burrell I ground the edges first with a carbide rotary tool. This removed a significant amount of material, but wasn’t that gentle.
Edges of spokes roughly carved. One round robin sanding of the spokes. Finished flywheel before being painted.
The finished and painted flywheel looks rather good. Also, the size and weight has worked rather well as the engine runs very smoothly on around 10psi of compressed air.
A week spent simplifying the oscillating engine and producing the CAD for the engine has worked out rather well.
This also means I now can offer plans for this rather lovely engine.
