Hello everyone,

The last time I ran my steam bike, a some sort of problem occurred and I couldn't get water into the boiler and it wasn't making steam. The time I ran it before this everything ran well and properly.

Anyway this past weekend my father check over the water bypass, the boiler check, and the boiler to figure out what was wrong since I am away at college I am unable to work on it myself right now. My father discovered that when he hooked up the boiler to a hose on the side of the house the boiler must be plugged because water was being forced in one side and dripping out the other there was no fault with the water bypass or the check.

Now that I know its plugged or getting plugged I've thought of ways of dealing with it.

I know that when stanleys' get the fuel preheater coils plugged people have pumped grease into at up to 1000psi to unclog it.

The other idea I have would be to use a boiler hydrostatic testing device that I could gain access to although the water may constantly drip through making this method much.

I suspect that the back end of the boiler may have been at 400-500psi even if the pressure gauge would read 10psi.

Do any of you who have dealt with monotube boilers on whites or in general ever have run into these problems? or have any ideas of how to unplug it?

Robert Hopkins

I know that when stanleys' get the fuel preheater coils plugged people have pumped grease into at up to 1000psi to unclog it.
Robert Hopkins

I have never heard of this before. All the ones I’ve worked on once the cable has got stuck to the point you can’t get it out, you scrap it and build a new one. Only on one was I able to feed oxygen inside and heat the outside red, and it burned the carbon out. By the time I finished I still scraped it and built a new one.

A mono tube boiler has a different problem. All the water that goes in one end has to come out the other end. All the minerals, all the microorganisms, all the dead plant vegetation. All the stuff no one thinks about that is in water gets cooked. In a normal boiler only clean steam goes to the superheater section of the boiler. All the crud stays in the boiler. In a normal boiler this is the black crud you blow out every time you shut the boiler down.

I have never used a mono tube boilers. But from what I’ve read about the Doble boilers it’s the last four or five feet of the superheat section that gets a buildup of crud inside the tube. The superheater section should be removable from the rest of the coil. Somewhere I’ve read that sandblasting through the tube has been used to remove the buildup. Never done it, only read about it.

Rolly

Rolly

Well this weekend I finally got around to working on unplugging the boiler so I put some vinegar in it saturday night. The next morning I decided to try and use pressure to force the water out since it wasn't a complete plug in the tube using air pressure and fill the boiler with vinegar.

Turns out when I attached the air to the steam end of the boiler the end I put vinegar in it blew the plug out. So my problem is fixed. I got lucky I was ready to let it sit for like 2 weeks or a month to let it dissolve the plug.

Before I put it back on the bike I'm gonna do some work to add a blow down to the steam line.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/08/2011 01:28AM by Stanleyguy101.