The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

1901 T II .
E L ] C M OTIVE. 43
reduced. The idea may be of no value to you, or it may have been tried and abandoned ;
but. I call your attention to it, because I have found it useful to myself and others. In
a large plant there is always a more or less divided responsibility, and caution is a good
thing."
Pump Troubles.
Pumps are tricky things, anyhow. There was a time when many of the pump
phenomena that we get up against might have been explained as caused by witchcraft;
but in this century that won't go, and we have to find some hydraulic or kinetic theory
or something else, to fit each particular case, and it does seem at times as though the
homeopathic treatment, with monkey-wrench, packing, and perseverance, was rather
too mild, and we would like to administer a massage- with a ten-pound sledge, and supplement
it with a course of cupola elixir — if we had the time, and didn't need that par-
ticular pump right then and there.
One of my first encounters with a pump was about the time when I had arrived at
the 1 now-it-all stage; and if I had any idea when I went for that pump that there was
any mechanical knowledge in the world worth having that was not already in my pos-
session, I came back, at least, feeling that I was an authority on that particular breed of
pumps. When I reached the place I found a single-cylinder Knowles pump. I had
never seen nor heard of one before, and it may possibly have occurred to me, when the
engineer said he had a machinist there all the day before who "had her all apart and
could't make her pump," that I might get points on so simple a thing as a steam pump
before I got through. "She ran all right until yesterday. She lost her water and
won't catch. There is plenty of water in the well; only ten feet lift; pipes all right
and nothing wrong with the pump, for we had her all apart; only she won't pump."
" Cau you start her up?" I asked. He gave the throttle a turn, and that pump
just gave two or three shivers and then started off like a pneumatic calking tool, mak-
ing about 4,030 one-inch strokes a minute, and was just beginning to walk off the foun-
dation when I got her stopped. I walked around that pump twice; partly because I
didn't know what else to do. I couldn't make out what that rocker-arm arrangement
hitched on to the valve stem was for. I found there was a thing on the piston-rod
w'.iich seemed to be to knock the rocker arm first one way an I then the other. I had
the engineer start it very slowly ; but it only gave little convulsive jerks, as though its
life as a pump was about at an end. I never knew just what inspired me to do it, but I
put two fingers on the rocker arm, possibly to see if I could get them cut off, when
suddenly the pump started off in the most well-behaved manner possible, and it contin-
ued to run so as long as my fingers remained there ; but as soon as I removed them it took
another fit. I finally got it into my head that that rocker arm worked too easily, and I
discovered that the stud on which it was pivoted had a special spring washer under the
nut for the purpose of making sufficient friction to keep the arm in one position until
the pump made a complete stroke and knocked it back again. A half-turn on the nut
made the pump all right. I think, now, that the other fellow must have been awfully
stupid ; still, subsequent experience has proved to me that there are others.
The duplex pumps have displaced many of the former annoying and complicated
valve gjars, with auxiliary pistons, which in turn were operated by auxiliary valves
with ports drilled in them which looked like stray blow-holes of no particular impor-
tance — at least, that is what I thought they were when I first saw them. It was at
a big brick works, two miles out. They telephoned in, just about quitting time, to