B F Sturtevant pic

Here are some pics of the steamer. If anyone has historical or technical knowledge please reply. The unit will be setup on active (air) display in our showroom, once complete. (The showroom that is) I want to display with appropriate signs giving all info gathered. You can get resto details at the steamer page link below picture. Thanks




Sturtevant steamer page

I am just guessing here. I saw one very similar to yours- no flywheel and long shaft on one side. The engine was origionally a big blower used to force air in a boiler room. The large squirel cage acted as a flywheel. I see you have a fabricated brass flywheel, that hints of a similar application. I guess to be technically accurate this would be a boiler room auxilary, or steam blower. Makes a nice little engine.

That could very well be since it is setup for a constant cutoff and it requires tools to reverse. It makes you think it had only one constant job to do. I did see a pic of a similar model with a flywheel though. It was hard to get any details from the seller of my engine. So I cant tell what is either missing or never there. What would such a blower do in a large steam installation? Bob

I can think of only one reason, soot blower or ventilation fan, combustion air is normally drawn in by gravity unless you had a confined boiler room, Soot blowers are mostly used with steam pressure however they could have used low pressure steam for heating purposes and not had the sufficient velocity to clean the boiler tubes, if the previous owner said that they were NOT using solid fuel or even oil with a rotary burner and instead using NAT gas it is possible that they were using the fan to supply the necessary secondary air under the fuel bed to promote proper combustion, however all this leads to is why would you not have sufficient steam capacity if you were using a steam engine it certainly would have required high pressure to operate at the required RPM and they may just have not wanted to use steam to clean the tubes. if the shaft was extended to drive a pump then I could imagine it was a boiler feed pump of some sort.

Steam engines were commonly used to drive stokers, induced draft fans, condensate pumps, and other boiler room auxilliaries. They were also used to drive blowers on heat exchangers and air handling units. The speed of a steam engine can be varied either by a manual valve or one operated by air pressure acting on a diaphragm to open or close the gate in a valve in the steam line, just as the governor does to control speed. This allows for a level of automated control that is now often done with freq drives on electric motors. A search through issues of Power magazine from the 1890's through the teens will show that these engines were applied in that fashion.

If you check out the New England Wireless and Steam Museum's web page, they show the company's letterhead, and it specifies blowers as their main product, so the use as a blower motor might well have been the original application.

After looking at original factory photos supplied by someone who saw my post, it is most likely a fan engine. I received a lot of info from this post and I thank all involved for their generousity.

If you will look at this site http://www.marmus.ca/marmus/engine1.htm you will see a picture of your engine still hooked up to a "steam generating set" on a cast for purpose base.