Notes to on Chuk’s Bonneville car engine

This engine was originally built to go into a planning speed launch, hence the PSL designation.  It was designed around a re-build kit for an International Farmall Cub C-123 engine which fortuitously had four cylinders so there was an extra part for the three cylinder Chrysler outboard engine block that was the basis of the PSL engine.  The Farmall tractor was originally a 3” bore and 4” stroke. 

For the steam engine the liner was bored out to 3 1/8” and it used the outboard’s original 2.8” stroke.  The outboard had an original bore of 3 5/16” and so the liner was machined down to fit tightly into that bore. 

The re-build kit included pistons as well as cylinder liners and so the tractor pistons were used.  Because the wrist pin was lower in the piston than its location in the outboard piston the liner stuck a little bit above the block.  Things were machined so that the little end of the original outboard connecting rod fit the wrist pin in the tractor piston.  Or maybe it was the tractor piston that was re-machined a little. 

Jim Tangeman did the machining on the hot end of the PSL engine.  He has also designed a steam launch engine around a cut-down Ford in-line six and this same C-123 re-build kit, hence his familiarity with the concept.

At Bonneville the burner burned, the water pumps pumped, the steam generator generated, and the engine turned around.  Every so often we would tighten things up and bolt things back on and we got some good runs in.  I wound some of the coils out of ½” schedule 40 black iron pipe, pancake coils, for the boiler and am excessively proud of the results.