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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 14:40:49 :
In Reply to: OT: Steam donkey posted by OleManIdaho [164.165.147.34] on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 11:06:31 :
I grew up hearing lots of tales of donkey engines and seeing lots of pictures. Best picture is this one, my great-uncle Guy Schafer on his donkey when they had the contract to grade Robbins Hill, between Molalla and the Molalla River near where Feyer's park is now. The link goes to a picture of a BIG one that Weyerheauser had. Here are some other links:
Moving the donkey into place, with water wagon: http://www.slatecreekengineering.com/images/road/robhill2.JPG
Grading the hill: http://www.slatecreekengineering.com/images/road/robhill.JPG
Big donkey: http://www.slatecreekengineering.com/images/road/bigdonk.JPG
I don't think I have any pictures of my grandpa's donkey. I know he bought it second hand from the Alaskan Junk Company in Portland for $1000 back in the 1930s, and he used it to drag three houses across the fields on skids and assemble them into the family home on Dickey Prairie. He used it mostly for logging.
I have more, bigger, and better pictures on my facebook page, but I have no idea how to let everybody see them. Two friends told me I should set up a facebook page, so I did, but I have yet to figure out what it's good for. I did post a bunch of old-time pictures there though. Maybe try this link: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000581378643&v=info#!/album.php?aid=8255&id=100000581378643&ref=pb
Or if all that gobbledygook doesn't work, maybe you can find them by searching for "David Sherman" on facebook. I'm the one whose picture is the picture of a white dog.
As for the boiler, good luck. I have a porcupine boiler of the sort that might have been used on a steam donkey, but I was told it came out of a boat. A friend up in the Okanogan ran a small steam engine with it, and I hope to set the whole contraption back up again someday. You can run your engine on compressed air if you just want to turn it over and make sure it works. I have two boilers and steam engines, both of which supposedly "ran when parked" but I haven't fired either of them up yet. On the one hand, I've been told that if you hydrostatically test it, never exceed that pressure, and make sure that the water always covers all the tubes, they're perfectly safe. On the other hand it's a thermodynamic fact that there's a stick of dynamite in every gallon of water (at 100 psi) and I've read in old books that it used to be the law that power boilers had to be scrapped and replaced every 20 years. Modern writers say to never even think about using a fire-tube boiler, which is what many of the old ones were. Water-tube and flash boilers are safer because there's less pressurized water in them. I'm not sure how a porcupine boiler would be classified -- the water is partly in tubes, but there's a water jacket with plenty of volume and potential for exploding.
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