Steam Engine Design and Mechanism Paperback – April 19, 2008

I have a number of the old International Correspondance Schools (ICS) locomotive series books. For those who have never seen them, these were small, blue, hard-cover volumes published by the ICS from around 1900 - 1950.This book is a reprint from the ICS.The ICS books were intended to be used for correspondance courses to train locomotive engineers, brakemen, shoprepair employees and others. So these are definitely NOT "coffee table" books. Don't buy this if you are looking for a"Gee, look how that works!" volume. This book goes through the theory of the construction of frames, boilers, rods,fireboxes, and many other aspects of steam locomotive design. The principles are explained with excellent drawings.The reader is expected to have a firm grasp of mathematics and physics, enough to understand the laws of volume, pressure,mass, friction, and other fundamental physical properties.Having said that, one reason I like this item is that while it is a seriousinstructional book, the auythors do not expect that you will have a graduate degree in math or physics to understand it.If you've still got a firm grasp of your high school mathematics, chemistry and physics (or, like many of us, if those thingsare a dim memory, but they come back to you when you start using them again) you will be able to understand this book.And there is a lot of excellent "meat" in this book to be had. So if you have ever wondered how a set of locomotive drivers are designed, why they are shaped the way they are, why the rods are connected where they are and how the calculations are performed to,say, balance the wheels and rods so they don't just hammer and fly apart at high speed, then this is the book for you.If you have wondered why boilers and fireboxes are made a certain shape and size, how thermal efficiency is calculated,how the cylinders are sized, and so on, this is the book for you.You'll have some heavy scientific reading to do, but the payoff is worth it. Excellent book.

This is a reprint of an old ICS (International Correspondence School) book that focuses mainly on the slide valve steam engine. It will show you everything that engineers of the late 1880's knew about these engines, and that was a lot. This is a text and requires some familiarity with the slide valve engine (very simple. check youtube) and a working knowledge of trigonometry. It is a course of study and will require some hours of patience and dedication. I think it would be a wonderful companion book to Fitt's, STEAM AND STERLING. The illustrations are wonderful in that nineteenth century way and the diagrams in the back of the text are almost all you need to grasp the fundamentals of the slide valve steam engine. An excellent gift for any engineering student.

I've read a lot of books on engine design, but this is different from all of them. This book contains great instructions and formulas for designing a steam engine, but nothing else. There are no history lessons, no extra stories, no foreword, no index, no table of contents, and no background information. This is a very practical book for someone who's career is designing steam engines (hence the correspondence school publisher). I was very interested to see how many formulas were simplified, and how great the factors of safety were increased in order to simplify the design.I didn't realize how much I enjoy reading the extra stories and period examples that usually come in an engine design book. I rated this book high because the content is excellent. I will keep it on my shelf an use it as the practical reference that it is. I will look for another book that contains the history, stories, and examples that I would like to accompany this book.

Nicely done reprint with lots of steam engine information.The book explains basic steam engine operation and then goes into detail on designing the various components of an engine, everything from the basic engine dimension for a required horsepower to the dimensions of the spokes of the flywheel. Although I doubt that I will ever design a steam engine, I am enjoying learning a lot about the basics of them while reading this book. The math used in the formulas in the book involve some algebra, simple trigonometry and basic geometry but nothing beyond high school leve.l.

Exactly what i was looking for. complete designs, Specs, and formulas for builds. Anyone with a background in machining could easily interpret designs and maybe make one.

I bought this book hoping to learn in general about various steam engines and their design considerations, as well as to use as a quick reference for calculations and such. Unfortunately, the book does not have a table of contents, making it almost useless as a reference.The book jumps right into lots of lofty jargon, and references to tables and articles that may or may not exist in the book. I guess you just have to read the whole thing to find out, considering the lack of table of contents. After about 100 pages of calculations and lofty technical jargon there is finally a chapter on the fundamental workings of a steam engine.It will be a nice book for the shelf, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it. But it leaves a lot to be wanted in it's layout to be a useful guide.

This has some really neat engineering information for steam engine design. There are also some very informative engravings as well. It introduced me to the concept of residual pressure required in the cylinder towards the end of the stroke. I had never thought of that before.

Contains all the measurements and formulas and equations (ratios & proportions) necessary to build any size desired.

This was a good reprint of an old technical book. However the reprint had no table of contents or index which were left out when the reprint was done. There was no date of the original text and the publisher has taken out a copyright on his reprint. Is that legal? There is no address of the publisher so one does not know what country the copyright was taken out in or how to cite the work in an article. In general I must say that I was not pleased

ottimo testo ricco di disegni accurati ed un buon apparato matematico indispensabile per comprendere come funzionano i macchinari descritti, peccato si tratti di una ristampa attuale.

Muchos esquemas y bien detallado

Bon livre pour étudier les machines vapeur

A little too technical for me, with a large number of mathematical equations backing up the engine designs. More suitable for a mechanical engineer or model steam engine builder.