April 13th, 2000

Recently I have been getting many "free" days to work on my steam car design, but I still end up with lots of busy days which delay the project, and many more are on the way. C'est la vie. I think my steam car design is shaping up and getting finalized enough that I will soon have nothing left to do but build the car in my free hours.

The number of small yet vital details and dimensions to figure out in a steam car powerplant is just amazing. I have seriously underestimated the design job. I am increasingly "cribbing notes" from the classic steam cars to cut down on the endless design work and to speed my progress toward the construction stage. I suspect that this has given some people the impression that I am a nostalgic, romantic kook with a silly attachment to outdated technology. In reality, I simply do not want to spend my entire life "reinventing the wheel" from scratch/theory with no guidelines. That would be very easy to do, considering how much work it takes just to copy certain successful features, parameters, and rules of thumb of the old steam automobiles. The heck with "reinventing" the steam car -- I want a good steam car to drive and produce!

From my studies of dozens of steam car projects, I think that the extra labor of totally reinventing the steam car is what kills most steam car projects. Most developers have tried to start designing from scratch, and eventually drowned under the work load. Bill Lear is a good example. There are many others.

I don't mean to discourage anyone from working on radical departures from existing steam car design. I am only stating my personal reasons for minimizing (though far from avoiding) such departures in my own project. In fact, the more I learn about the difficulties of steam car design and development, the more I admire the few who have succeeded with radical, "clean sheet of paper" projects. One example is the SES boiler of the 1970s -- 138 net hp worth of steam from a boiler weighing 110 pounds and measuring 16 inches in diameter by 18 inches long! I had great difficulty designing for 1/4 the amount of steam from a unit of about the same size and weight -- though my design is about 1/3 the weight of a comparable classic flash boiler, and about 1/6 the weight of a comparable Stanley boiler. Many of the now-proven features of the "classic" steam cars were radical departures and improvements when first introduced.

My impending acquisition of a precision metalworking lathe is speeding up the design-finalization decision process. Of course, the design process continues during construction, as the inevitable unanticipated problems arise. But you need a complete preliminary design to start building with, because all the parts of a steam car have to be designed to work well together. Designing and building each component separately, one at a time, is another thing that has killed many steam car projects. Totally rebuilding everything because too little attention was paid to anticipating interdependent features, has led to many fatal frustrations, delays and budget overruns in steam car projects.

I am now solving some of my knottier design problems by adding tiny bits of lathe work where it reduces the total workload. I had outlined ways to do many of these things without a lathe, but am now finding that there was more design and construction work involved in some of these no-machining details. I am still minimizing machining for production cost reasons, but am finding some limitations to this approach, and am pleased at the improvements made possible by adding a little machining here and there. Having your own lathe is more beneficial to a shoestring steam car project than I had previously thought.

I find that the steam car design process is gradually revealing many limitations of the "KISS" approach (KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid). It is also explaining the apparent (and actual) complications and deficiencies in antique and modern steam cars, and is showing me why there are so few steam cars in the world today! Before I got deeply into designing my own steam car, I was often mystified by these things.

I think that getting a steam car powerplant into profitable (and thereby regular) limited production is the only solution to the rarity and consequent obscurity of steam cars. Today there are only a few hundred steam cars left on the road, and none have been commercially produced for 65 years. Individual one-off steam car hobbyist projects, though fun and worthwhile in their own right, have put very few steam cars on the road, because, sadly, most such projects fail under the weight of the numerous and considerable difficulties involved. When the number of running steam cars increases, even by a small amount, people's awareness and knowledge of this technology will increase considerably, and the steam car will begin to get the attention it deserves as an affordable alternative to the relatively costly, polluting, and poor-running internal combustion car.

Commercial availability of steam car components will also promote further development. Today very little equipment suitable for steam cars is available off the shelf, and this hinders steam car developers. Abner Doble, for example, benefitted greatly from the availability of Stanley and other steam car components in his early work.

Needed but premature engine & control design has engrossed me for the past few weeks. I am setting this work aside for now, so I can focus on dimensioning/blueprinting the last of the fuel system, and start building it. One component at a time. Fuel pump, then fuel system. Then the burner, boiler, controls, and engine, in that order.

It is often difficult to focus on any set order of component design, with all the interconnected & interdependent components which need to be designed for a steam car. At least the details I have worked out in the "wrong" order will save me work down the line. So my flexible, ever-changing design schedule is not a waste of time. To a large extent it has proven necessary.

Hopefully this complicated, challenging process will result in the production of standardized, good-running steam cars. I am keeping that goal in mind at all times.