bulletin - The National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors

FEATURE
18
lowered into the pit and tested to
destruction. The boiler exploded at a
pressure between 1,800 and 2,000
pounds per square inch. Although
no production car used a steam
pressure higher than 600 psi, neither
were they fitted with any of the
racing-type boilers.
6
An August 1903 magazine
article described the
failure of an Ofeldt “Salamandrine”
boiler near Cincinnati. The car in
question was a Mobile, which was
normally fitted with a Stanley boiler. It is perfectly clear
what happened: the boiler had been run totally dry, then,
while it was very hot, a large quantity of water was
pumped into it by a steam-powered feed pump. The driver
was not killed because he had dismounted in order to turn
off the burner, which could not be done from the seat.
7
A Stanley reportedly exploded May 13, 1906,
in Omaha, Nebraska. The upper tubesheet went
straight up and the lower tubesheet went down against
the ground. The people in the car received minor injuries
from insulation blown into their faces. It is believed the
boiler had a copper shell and that the circumstances of the
accident involved a hot dry boiler into which water was
pumped. Early Stanleys did use copper shells, but steel
shells were standard from about 1906.
8
The explosion of the boiler in an 1899
Locomobile in Columbia, South Carolina,
December 11, 1906, is the only documented case I have
found of the wire wrapping used on Stanley boilers failing
while in service. The story claims the boiler was choked
NATIONAL BOARD BULLETIN/FALL 2003
by corrosion from constant use of
river water, and had made ominous
sounds just before the failure.
A boiler explosion in a
1903 “Geneva” car
August 10, 1908, near Painesville,
Ohio, killed two people. The boiler
had a copper shell about 1/16 of an
inch thick and was not the boiler
normally fitted to the car, which
was a semi-flash boiler with a steelshelled
firetube section above a
watertube section. There is no
mention of a wire wrapping, which would be absolutely
essential on a copper shell boiler at normal automotive
steam pressures. The accident happened near the bottom
of a long downhill grade, and it is assumed that the fire
had not shut off when it should have and the safety valve
had stuck.
10
9
In a 1912 Stanley Mountain Wagon, a four-inch
section of the weld between the upper tubesheet
and the shell failed and released the steam with sufficient
violence that the hood (bonnet) flipped up and smashed
the windshield. Nobody, either in the car or near it, was
injured. I do not consider this incident an “explosion,” as
the boiler shell remained essentially intact.
There have been steam car explosions in recent years, but
all involved fuel tanks, not boilers. There have been boiler
failures also, but these have not been explosions. A great
many Stanley drivers have “scorched” their boilers by
running them dry, including this writer. But so long as
only the normal engine-driven or hand-operated feed pumps
are used, this situation is expensive, not dangerous. ❖