Category: Uncategorized

Making Elmer’s “Tall Vertical Open Column”

Posted on by Adam

The late Elmer Verburg designed quite a few relatively-easy-to-build model engines. All are made from bar stock. The second one I have made is #32, the “Tall Vertical Open Column”. As many people do, I made a number of minor changes. These are described here, along with some construction notes I wrote to help myself, some observations and some pictures.

The plans can be found online in several places: there are several “Yahoo Groups” as well as “jon-tom.com“. I have also uploaded them (see “Files” section).

Notes and Comments

I opted not to paint the base and top platform, having previously made a mess of painting. Instead, I left them relatively “raw”: the as-rolled large faces of the bar stock were very lightly cleaned up and the edges were draw-filed. I’m fairly happy with this approach and like the contrast with the shiny flywheel and brass components.

In the interest of simplifying construction – and reducing the need for careful working, which is not my strong point – an alternative method of constructing the eccentric sheave and the arms that ensure a straight-line motion of the piston rod were used. See the “Files” section below.

The only problem encountered on assembly was that the straight-line that the arms followed did not match the piston rod. It is worth making the holes on the base plate of the cylinder assembly a bit slack to allow for adjustment but I ended up having to insert a 15 thou shim under one corner to get the motion to be “good and free”. I suspect that this is due to having used quite small AF hexagon rod for the columns such that it didn’t pull itself square on tightening. On the other hand, it could simply be a misplaced hole.

Quite a few of the joints leak slightly – see the video – since I just left them as metal-on-metal.

Some other examples on the web:

Files

 

Death of a Corsa (1.0 Twinport)

Posted on by Adam

The sad remains of my Z10XEP engine.

The piston rod fractured just next to the big end bearing with “intersting” consequences. It didn’t sound as bad as it looks; it sounded like there was just something like a branch caught under the car. Initial diagnostic scan was P0335 – CKP Sensor A Circuit Performance – because pieces of swarf and broken piston ring were stuck to the sensor (it is magnetic).

The Big End (showing its fracture)
The Piston Rod
The Remains of the Piston

A Template for “Top Trumps” using MS Powerpoint

Posted on by Adam

I had a fancy to create a template for my kids to make their own Top Trumps cards and thought I could do better – from the point of view of usability – than what I could (relatively easily) find on the web.

Here is my first attempt Top Trumps Template, NB only uploaded for MS Powerpoint 2007 as there are a couple of niggles to resolve for backwards compatibility. Let me know what you think. The same “Creative Commons” licence applies to reuse just as for everything else on this site. Please feel free to comment…

Some notes on using and adapting the template:

There are 3 layouts set for the “slide master”, one for the card (with lots of placeholder boxes for text and a picture), one for a title card and one for a rear side.

I’ve used a combination of placeholder boxes (i.e. the boxes you normally add your content to) and some boxes that are only editable in the slide master (for content that will be the same for all cards). I’ve also set the background colour in the slide master.

The table at the bottom of the card is achieved by a bit of a dodge. There is an empty table with an alternating row style which I have “sent to back”. In front on the left side is a text box with the category names that can only be changed in the slide master. In front (of the table) on the right side is a placeholder for per-slide text. Font size and line-spacing has been chosen carefully to match the table. Basically: if you want to change the number of categories you need to know what you are doing