I was wondering if anyone could lead me to a photo or design of a homemade or brand dynamo muffler. I've got some boiler tube cut I was going to weld some baffles to the interior and see how the whine came down.

On another subject, has there ever been a patch or temporary fix to the floating brass or main driver crank pin wear in lieu of replacing brass on all the drivers? This is a round brass and not the split that is found on older engines. I'd like to know if there was any temporary solution to take out slop or pounding when the brass has worn down.

Pour babbit and machine it to grease clearance around the crankpin - assuming the crankpin is still in decent shape. If the pin itself is out of round, you will have to make the brass oversize to clear the large OD all the way around which can lead to a pound. Floating.....means you have to treat the outside dia of the brass as another bearing since it spins inside the bore in the rod as well as on the crankpin, if i understand you correctly.

By the time you do all this building up and resurfacing, you'd be way ahead to buy a drop of a decent bit of bearing bronze and turn out a new one. Won't take you more than a half a day with a decent engine lathe in any but the worst cases.

Good luck.

dave

Thanks. We already have two brand new brasses machined and ready to go but we felt that if they were put in before the other crank pins on the rest of the drivers were worked on as well that we would just be beating up the new stuff. Our winter plans include new brass for all the rods but at this point we're just babying along on what we've got.

Well, you might try pouring soft babbit around the crankpin with the old brass in place using a proprietary damming compound to seal around the edges after sooting up the crankpin with acetyline smoke so it doesn't adhere. This falls into the "limping home" category, but depending on how you use your locomotive might buy a bit of time.....

Agree with the plan to overhaul all the stuff at one fell swoop so you KNOW what you have to work with.

dave