Chris Johnson

It isn’t often you get to compare your writing with that of your father and grandfather. My grandfather was a PhD with published works. I should try to find his thesis and other publications. I have read his unpublished autobiography.

My father had a few articles published, and I’m sure he wrote more. I should attempt to get his master’s thesis from ODU.

Yesterday my daughter stumbled onto a couple of articles published by my father. I write like he did. I guess I speak like he did as well.

I’m positive that much of my very dry humor comes from him.

His layout was what was known as an “operational” layout. This meant that you could run it realistically. He had cards that represented loads and destinations. The yard operators would have to make up trains, which would then be moved over the main line to different yards by other operators.

Still other operators would run the locals. These were the little trains that went to the different businesses to pick up and drop off loads.

A standard operating session would be 7 or more operators working over 3 hours on a 6:1 fast clock. In other words, they would simulate 18 hours of operations in just 3 hours. Generally, was made up by the fact that the locations did not have real distances between them. So the dairy was only a 1/2 mile from the yard, while it was more like 6 miles in reality.

Regardless, I love and miss Dad. If you feel like it, go read his entire article. He has pictures and more.

Brown University is in Rhode Island, one of the anti-gun states. There are no guns allowed on campus.

It is a gun free zone within a gun free city within a gun free state. Yet all of those things failed.

To provide a sense of security, the college webpage has a section on security cameras. They list some 800 security cameras and where each is located and their field of view.

Which is precisely the sort of information a bad guy would want to know because it shows not only the areas that are under surveillance but also the blind spots. Which the shooter took advantage of.

Which brings up the experiment done by a news organization several years ago to “prove” that guns don’t save lives. They told the selected “protector” that they were the only person with a gun in the room. That there was going to be a mass shooting event, simulated, and they were to stop the shooter.

Everybody except for the protector was in on the experiment, unbeknownst to the protector. Many of the protectors bragged to their “student” neighbors about being the protector.

Of course, when the bad guy entered the room, the protector never successfully stopped them. The entire experiment was set up for failure.

This was compared to a similar experiment set up in Texas. In the Texas experiment, the protectors were chosen at random; the level of experience the different protectors had varied from none to significant. They used simunation (blue guns that shoot nasty little pellets).

What they found was that the total number of victims was reduced in all cases. That in some situations the attack was stopped shortly after it began. There were no false shootings.

One of the interesting sequences was when the bad guy came into the room with the good guy. The good guy put multiple rounds on target before being “killed”. During the debrief, they asked why he only took body shots after noticing the body armor.

His reply, “I’ve been shot with those things; I wasn’t going to shoot somebody in the face with them.”

The point of this rambling is that guns save lives. This was another example of a gun free zone creating a victim pending zone.

Keep your head on a swivel, things are not getting better.

It is difficult to comprehend what a piston powered steam engine is capable of doing. It is a different sort of beast than the internal combustion engine.

For those that are old, you might have grown up with a manual transmission. There is a considerable skill in learning how to balance the clutch and engine speed to get smooth motion.

This is hidden in a value we call “horse power”. Horse power is also expressed in Watts. There are 745 watts to a HP, depending on sources. Close counts in this calculation. HP and watts are a measure of work.

Consider picking up a barbell. By measuring the force required to lift it, the time it takes to lift it, and the distance moved, we can measure the power used.

Now consider that same barbell, but it is too heavy to lift even a fraction of an inch. You strain trying to lift it. You have expended energy but have no performed any work. Hence the HP and watts are zero.

Regardless, an internal combustion engine needs some type of clutch to allow the engine to run at a comfortable speed while slowly bringing a different part of the powertrain up to speed.

With a steam engine, you have full torque at every speed. They are spectacular engines at slow speeds.

This takes us to present times.

I’m using FreeCAD to create the 3D model of the engines. A side advantage of this is that I also get assemblies that allow me to check how all the parts fit together. All very nice. This has helped me identify errors in my reading of the drawings.

A simple little thing: The cylinder has a built in bracket system. This is a face used to mount the cylinder to the base and the face used to attach the steam chest. These faces are slightly offset from the bore.

Which leads to my error, times 3. The cylinder mounting holes are not on the center line of the cylinder. They are instead on the center line of the bore. The bore is offset away from the steam chest and away from the mounting holes.

My error? I’ve put those damn mounting holes in the wrong place multiple times.

In the end, I added a spreadsheet to the model. For every shared measurement between parts, I’ve put that value in the spreadsheet. This means that I can do things like change the stroke by changing one value. Sort of.

My understanding of this mechanical marvel is much improved from being able to see the parts work together.

Another thing I noticed was that all the engine plans have an assumption you will be working with castings. They expect you to hire a pattern maker to create the patterns and then have your local foundry cast them.

While I would love to make my castings from iron, I will start with making them from aluminum. And the new tools I have and new skills I have in woodworking allow me to make real patterns.

My final goal is to have master patterns and molding boards for patterns for a couple of different engines. If I can accomplish that and make a few of them, I’ll be very happy.

Next stop, learning how to be a safe boilermaker. And not the happy drink type.

This is the second Christmas without my parents. Last year, about now, I was finding out just how nasty my brother actually is. Which gratefully caused me to connect with “The Cousins”.

This year I am doing a bit better. Not great, but better.

Growing up, Christmas had rules. You got three “major” presents. Mom made sure they matched you and, to her, more importantly, that the value of your set of presents exactly matched your siblings.

I swear that Mom would make that balance within a few nickels every year.

As the number of grandkids grew and Mom became more mentally fragile, she couldn’t keep up with matching presents to kids. She switched what she was doing.

Each kid, grandchild, spouse or significant other, and “adopted” child received the same thing: a beautiful Christmas ornament and a cash gift.

The first time this happened, it was difficult for me; I was broke, so that cash was extremely helpful. But the ornament matched me, and that was what I was truly thankful for, but I also needed to express my gratitude for the cash. I didn’t want my parents to think it was just the cash that was important to me.

Over the years Mom’s ability to choose personal ornaments declined, but it was still a staple.

Last year there were no ornaments from Mom. She and Dad were gone.

As Christmas started growing nearer this year, I felt the loss of my parents overwhelming me. Knowing that there would be no ornaments, no cash from Mom under the tree.

I fixed it. I got the addresses of all the cousins, the names of their spouses and significant others, any children they had, adopted or natural. Then I got ornaments for them all. The female adults got ornaments from one collection, and everybody else got them from a different collection.

Those ornaments with a $10 bill were packaged up and sent out.

Everybody that Mom would have sent a gift to received a gift. Even my brother.

It worked. All who have reported so far have been very pleased.

The Question

What is a Christmas tradition that your family has that you took over when your parents passed or that you want your offspring to take up when you pass?

It is my belief that Trump was a reluctant president. In 2016 he ran almost as a joke. His goal seemed more to disrupt the normal Republican party politics than to actually become president.

The Democrats certainly thought he was a joke. They did everything in their power to make him the Republican nominee. The amount of free publicity he received from the mainstream media was astonishing. Everybody loved him. At least among the people who counted.

He was a brass man who said what many of us had been thinking. He called out the press for lying. He stood up to the people handing him gotcha questions. He put forth the image of a powerful leader that could lead our country in the right direction.

He was not the man I wanted for my president. I went to bed knowing the next four years were going to be horrible under the evil, selfish, egotistical control of Hillary Clinton.

I woke to the surprising news that Hillary had lost. I didn’t see it as Trump winning but more as Hillary wasn’t going to be the president.

He then stepped on the rake. TDS struck everybody who hadn’t voted for Trump. The entire “not my president” shit started up. Bush, the evil, was held up as a wonderful example of a “good” president. And the deep state took it upon themselves to thwart the will of the democratically elected president of the United States.

His agenda was stopped in its tracks. But one thing moved forward. And that was the retaking of the courts.

Our courts had become another legislative branch. If the left didn’t control the country via the ballot box, they controlled it via corrupted judges.

Trump’s first legacy was in getting so many originalists onto the courts. Instead of a zero chance of getting an originalist panel in the Ninth Circuit, it became almost 50/50. There was even a chance of getting an originalist en banc panel.

He did the same in every circuit. One place that he succeeded was in the Third Circuit.

There is something amazing happening in our judicial system; we are seeing a circuit courts over blue states turn red. This is huge in the grand scheme of things.

There are so many constitutional questions out there that never get to the Supreme Court. They don’t get there because the lower courts manipulate the stats. They game the system.

The Supreme Court is asked to hear nearly ten thousand cases a term. They hear less than 100. Those are not good odds.

The justices meet once a week, on Friday, to discuss what cases they want to hear. If 4 justices vote to hear a case, it will be placed on the Supreme Court docket.

The justices would like to hear cases that have major implications. They don’t like trivial cases. One of the things that suggests a case will have major implications is if multiple circuit courts have reached different opinions on the question presented.

Trump’s legacy includes creating situations for circuit splits.

At this time we are looking at a circuit split regarding assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. This is only because of Trump. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is now an originalist majority court. This means that for the first time, originalists have heard cases involving these types of bans.

If the rulings come out for the Constitution and The People we will have a circuit split. Circuit split means the Supreme Court is more likely to hear the case.

Clawing Back Power

There are three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. This is laid out in our Constitution. For many years it was said that the fourth branch of government was the media. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that the media is just another branch of the Democrat party.

Democrats are the type of people that will go to bat a 100 times and swing and miss 100 times. Then on the 101 they get a piece of the ball and score a run. At that point, they claim that the people have spoken and that there will never ever be a 102-pitch.

This wasn’t working. They would pass bad bills, and the next time a conservative got in office with a congress that backed him, the bad law would be undone. So they worked to “fix” the problem.

They did this by passing laws that restricted what later congresses could do.

The biggest thing they did was they stripped power from the President.

They did this by creating commissions instead of agencies.

The Department of War, the Department of Education, The Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, and so forth are all agencies headed by a single boss. That boss works at the pleasure of the President.

Congress couldn’t tell the President he was unable to fire the heads of these agencies because it is clearly stated in the Constitution that this was part of the Article II executive branch controlled by the President.

Instead, they started setting up commissions and boards. The National Labor Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The most recent was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is not an “agency” and is “independent” of the executive branch. It is also independent of the congress because it does not get its funding from congress.

When they set up these entities headed by commissions, Congress set rules for how the commissions were selected, how long they served, and how members could be removed.

This allowed these entities to ignore the orders of the president. He can’t fire them for ignoring the policies of the democratically elected president. So they could just keep on keeping on. This stripped the president of control of parts of the executive branch.

Trump’s legacy is the destruction of these “protected” boards and commissions. The Supreme Court should be finding these restrictions on presidential authority unconstitutional before June 2026. That is a legacy worth bragging about.

Everybody Knows (and was wrong)

The left likes to argue that just because something hasn’t been found unconstitutional in the past, it is constitutional today.

For years we were all taught, and we all learned, that if you were born in the United States, you were a citizen of the United States.

The Constitution doesn’t say that. History shows that everybody knew that the 14th Amendment applied to former slaves. It didn’t apply to foreigners. Until suddenly the left said that it did.

The outcome of the birthright case will change the political landscape for years and years to come.

Conclusion

Trump’s Legacy will be felt for decades, and it is in the fundamental changes he is making to the status quo and administrative state.

For years I’ve been told that the only reason wackadoodle assholes commit mass shootings, ignoring black on black gang violence, is because I refuse to give up my guns.

Only in America, with our horrible love affair with guns do mass shootings take place.

Therefore, it is obvious that this never took place:

Why Steam Engines

I’ve had a fascination in steam engines since my childhood. There are pictures of my brother in the museum in D.C. standing next to the drive wheels of a steam locomotive. The wheels were taller than my father.

What I didn’t realize as a child was that the actual engines were small compared to the size of the locomotive.

The engines of steam locomotives are the expansion cylinders that drive the wheels. Most of the rest of the locomotive is the boiler generates the steam for the engine.

As a child I was able to ride a steam locomotive a few times and always found them interesting.

Later I found out that steam engines are used for more than just locomotives. They were used to power tractors, steam shovels, boats, mills, and workshops. They were everywhere. It wasn’t until electric motors became cheap and plentiful that we saw the end of the steam engine.

Off Grid Use

An electric motor is used to convert power into rotational force. That power has to come from somewhere.

The most common “somewhere” is the power grid. If you are going off grid, that is not an option. It is also not an option when the grid is down.

Grid down is a common thing in these parts, it happens two or three times every year. It is so common that we do not depend on electricity for heat.

Yes, we have an oil fired furnace; no, it can’t be used without electricity. The burner unit requires power to inject the fuel and then it requires electricity to power the fans moving air through the system to warm the house.

Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow

This is used to describe a standard four-stroke engine. Each word indicates the purpose of a stroke of the piston. First the piston moves down, sucking in fuel and air; then it squeezes that fuel-air mixture; next a spark happens and the fuel-air mixture goes bang, pushing the piston down (this is the power stroke); finally the piston moves up, blowing the exhaust out of the cylinder.

There is one power stroke out of every four or one power stroke for every two revolutions of the crank.

To make this all happen, we have the camshaft. The camshaft consists of multiple lobes that push a rod upward to open a valve.

There is one lobe for each valve in an engine. For a single-cylinder engine, there are two valves.

That camshaft holds the magic timing for the valve train. It is synchronized to the crankshaft. The camshaft opens the intake valve and closes the exhaust valve at the start of the suck stroke. It closes both valves during the squeeze stroke and keeps them closed during the bag stroke. Finally, it opens the exhaust valve to allow the hot gases to escape during the push stroke.

Those camshafts are a engineering marvel.

Push, Push, Push, Push

A double acting steam engine generates power on every stroke of the piston. This is accomplished by being able to pressurize both sides of the piston, alternating between strokes.

Whereas the four stroke engine gets one power stroke in four, the double acting steam engine gets four power strokes in four.

Most steam engines use a slide valve; some use piston valves.

An internal combustion engine has the valves in the cylinder; slide and piston valve engines have an externally located valve.

There is a single passage for the steam to flow into and out of for each end of the cylinder. The slide valve moves in such a way that sometimes it is venting high-pressure steam into the cylinder, and then it vents that same passage to the exhaust port.

This single valve controls the ingress and egress of live and dead steam from the cylinder. It is very magical.

And just like that camshaft is an engineering marvel, so are these slide and piston valves.

The Rabbit Hole

A slide valve consists of three slots parallel to each other. The two outer slots lead to either end of the cylinder; the center slot leads to exhaust. The valve is shaped like an upside down square cake pan with large lips.

In the far end of the motion, the edge of the pan is between the steam passage and the exhaust passage. This allows the high pressure steam that fills the steam chest to push down on the cake pan/slide valve and flow into the exposed steam passage to one end of the cylinder.

At the same time, the center section of the pan covers both the exhaust passage and the steam passage to the other end of the cylinder, allowing the dead steam to escape down the exhaust passage.

As the valve slides in the other direction, the lip of the pan starts to cover the steam passage that had accepted the live steam. At the same time, the lip on the other side of the valve is starting to close over the other steam passage.

The size of the passages and ports, the size of the area under the valve, the size of the lips of the valve, the distance between ports all play a part in the efficient running of the engine. These have to be designed and manufactured correctly.

We can time the motion of the slide valve to the crankshaft. We can also adjust the valve so it is centered correctly. We can change the geometry of the valve without remaking it.

Which all takes me down the rabbit hole of learning about slide valves.

There are multiple textbooks, written during the age of steam, describing how the valves work and how to design them correctly.

And I haven’t even figured out what questions to ask to figure out what “wire drawing” in steam passages means and how to design the steam passages.

On the good news front, I will be able to get patterns made for everything that needs to be cast. Now to find a foundry to cast them.

Small Engines and Boilers

A Manual

Concise and Specific Directions For the Construction of Small Steam Engines and Boilers of Modern Types

Copyright 1899

Wow, isn’t that a mouthful.

I have been known to use polysyllabic words when a monosyllabic word would work just as well. This guy writes at an entirely different level.

Here is the gist of it: This stuff used to be simple and well known. It wasn’t uncommon to have regular people just make a steam engine in their barn.

He talks about how easy it is to make some of these things, until you find that he strongly suggests that you have patterns and castings made by a good quality foundry and pattern shop. It is better to pay 10 cents per pound for your castings, knowing them to be good, than to pay 6 cents and struggle.

I know how hard it is to make good patterns. I’m horrible at it but am willing to try again; now that I am better at hand woodworking, it makes a difference.

So I did some looking around. Did you know that you can still hire people to make patterns? Or you can just 3D print them, and I don’t mean the 3D printers in your house; these printers are designed to make foundry-ready patterns.

I’m not looking for an iron foundry near me to cast the patterns. I could do it myself in aluminum, and I want to try iron, but I’m unsure of myself at this point. I still might give it a go.

One thing I do know is that the shrinkage between aluminum and iron is different, so I can’t use the same pattern for both unless I design for it.

On the other hand, it might be nice to be able to have a place where I can get castings done.

Back to the book

This is the third major attempt I’ve made to read this book. I realized today why I was having so much difficulty. I am not used to illustrations being fully dependent on the text.

This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. This looks like a mechanical drawing, something to build a model from. It isn’t. It is a “skeleton diagram”. I think I got the term correct.

What this shows is the relationship between the different parts of the engine so that you can know how big it needs to be.

The figure shows the cylinder, frame, cylinder brackets, packing gland, packing nut, piston rod, theoretical cross slide, connecting rod, and theoretical crank. Oh, and the base plate.

The connecting rod is 3 times the length of the stroke. The diameter the crankpin travels is the stroke of the piston, so 2 inches. From the length of the connecting rod, the location of the crank at center of the cylinder, it is possible to determine the clearance needed for the connecting arm.

But the words aren’t what I expect; the top double circle is labeled “Top Center”. Today we would call this Top Dead Center (TDC). Likewise, “bottom center” is Bottom Dead Center (BDC), which we use for timing car engines today.

I studied this figure for hours and never did figure it out. There aren’t enough dimensions to make anything from this.

That’s because it isn’t a drawing to make things from; it is a diagram to help you with your design of an engine.

And this is why it is so hard. This is a mechanical drawing that was well within the ability of the target audience of this book to read and understand. Yet it would be nearly impossible for someone with the same knowledge base to use it as is today.

First, we don’t draw objects this way. It is missing views.

This would have been drawn with at least a top and side view as well as from both ends. The cross section would have been indicated with a cut line in one of the other views. Instead, all of that information is buried in this one figure and maybe something in the text.

The bore of this is defined as 3 inches, and the depth of the bore is 5 11/16 – 5/16 or 5 3/8 deep. But that is not called out. From this diagram, today, we would assume that the critical dimension is the 5/16 thickness of the rear wall. We can guess that the front flange is also 5/16, but there is no callout for that.

And while the steam passage is called out to have a 3/8 diameter, the distance from the steam passage to the front face is not defined. We also have radii that are not defined. This being left to the workman.

I made it most of the way through the book today. I need to go back over a couple of the paragraphs. The important thing for me was to stop focusing on the figures and instead to focus on the text.

Go ahead and enjoy some light reading:Small Engines and Boilers