Model Steam Engine+Boiler Project Update - Friday Final Stretch

Installed and mounted the final touches on the steam engine, mounting everything to the fancy base plate as well as threading+cutting all the piping. 

 Pictured above is the piping from the water tank to the boiler, with a little hand water pump in the bottom-left corner

Had to disassemble the boiler to get it mounted, and discovered some rust starting to form on the interior, probably from water leaking down from above.  I figured the heat would take care of this, but apparently not.    So I added a couple quick coats of high-temp paint to seal the interior as well as the outside.

Also since I want to eventually run this on alcohol, I put together a quick mockup with copper tube and paper towel wicks to see if I could make a simple alcohol burner. 

That worked pretty well.  About the same as I was getting with the propane torch, but with a bit more soot.

I'll definitely have to add that in the future, but for now I suppose I'll just stick with the propane torch setup until I feel like machining it

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That's it for today.  Just got to mount the engine and block to the baseplate tomorrow and bring it up to steam to finally finish up this project.

For those who haven't been following this,    I originally got the kit for Xmas and started working on it the day after.  Lots of machinist work because they are basically machined from raw stock and castings.  Was a good learning experience too because the complexity and blueprints and setups were new to me. 

Here is the 'before' pictures:😄

Once it's done, I plan on adding a generator to see how much juice I can get from it, and if it goes well I can try charging a cellphone with it, or more😁