I recently acquired a very nice Corliss Model which I think is about 50 years old. It looks like it is a Coles' model as it matches the one on the cover of the catalog 22. I was hoping to get some information on this model such as when was it first offered? Is it a model of a known engine or an original of the Corliss type? Can you still get drawings as Coles appears to be out of business? What scale is this model? What era of Corliss engines does it best represent?
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Yes, this is an original Coles Corliss, I have two of them and both are incomplete. I have been working on one for about 35 years, the other I bought from a dying machinist who said it was complete (it wasn't). He gave me the original plans that came with it. The drafter claimed he/she copyrighted it in 1946 and is well known amongst Corliss model makers. Eloda Ray is the copyrighter, presuming that is a woman's name, the initials that went with it as drafter were A.W. Ray. By today's standards these drawings are AWFUL, however, for that day, being no standards at all, the drawings are BRILLIANT. The originals are sometimes nearly impossible to decipher, many times did I have to refer to another part to decipher a dimension. THe biggest problem is that the drawings are so "busy", that is totally crowded with unnecessary dims and lettering. He put the same dim in up to 3-4 times for a single part. NOt only was this bad practice but it took up a tremendous amount of space and made the drawings very cluttered.
With all that criticism, I have a tremendous amount of respect and regard for whomever, A.W. was. Now, this particular Coles model is often referred to as the Coles/Ray Corlisss as this particular model almost always uses the Ray drawings. I have the drawings, however, I have updated a few to more modern machining methods, I thimk several, I combined into one piece, as I could see no reason for not having a single piece, those would be the steam and exhaust valve "stanchions" and the part that attaches the slide section to the crank body. I believe (but am not sure) that the parts were made in two pieces because amateurs in the 30s, 40s, 50s most likely could not do the machining we are capable of doing to day. There may have been some other reason, but I do not know what that could be.
There are a few other parts that instead of using the threads, I have substituted several tiny bolts to attaching them. these would be the steam chest bushing and the exhaust chest bushing. I did this because I cannot make the threads on these two bushings and I wonder how anyone could do this. If anyone knows how to put threads on a tiny amount of space such as these on the threading area, let me know. Making a few bolt holes and threads is very easy, I don't understand why anyone would even attempt to put threads in this impossible place.
There are also places I changed the drawings to make the machine more efficient. At the entrance of the steam port in the engine, the entrance was "flat" which produces steam bounce (that is, it bounces right back at the incoming steam creating turbulence) so I put the steam entrance as a slanted plane or best as a curved plane (the very best being a parabola but probably impossible to make for amateurs particularly for so little advantage). Also the exhaust baffle, I changed a little for the same reason, reducing turbulence.
I bought my kit about 40 years ago from someone out of Portland (Oregon) for 200$, an outrageous amount for those days. If they were still around, I believe they would be about 1000$ today--also an outrageous price but they are all out of business and the competition for these models is very high. I will try to attach a drawing to this particular rant to test out the effectiveness. The number of drawing I have are something like 35, the originals were 13 pages. In AutoCAD, I have 156 separate drawings which include all the specialized nuts and bolts--whoops, it's a bitmap, and is not alllowed. my eddress is
[email protected], so if you wish, send me a line and I will start uploading them to you. There are 43 and some of them are missing a few dims, and maybe some are incorrect (tho' that is far less likely than having missing dims.)
