The Phantom Whistle

Thinking back, I had heard that whistle once before, perhaps a
month or two earlier. Now and again I fire up my Crown Sheet Sales
boiler to run my Stuart 5A engine out in the driveway and do
probably annoy the neighbors by blowing its whistle from an
ex-B&O freight engine. Was this the Flying Dutchman of whistles
coming to haunt me?

Let’s go find it! So off in the car with the windows down
trying to vector in on the intermittent sound. Around the corner
and a block away is a large church setting well back from the
street which is surrounded by extensive parking facilities and
driveways. The sound was coming from there. Pulling in off the
street, I was face to face with an apparition coming towards me
belching steam and emitting the sound that had originally attracted
my attention. A tall slim boiler with its stack extending its
height even further was hiding the operator of this vehicle. The
seat he was occupying was a part of the angle iron frame. Suspended
beneath this frame was a flat, twin cylinder steam engine of the
Stanley Steamer genre and was propelling this collection of steam
era memorabilia.

I parked my car to one side and melted into the crowd of
onlookers that had gathered. What appeared to be the owner and his
son and a friend were attending the needs of this unique
transportation device. They had shut off the LPG burner and were
unscrewing the whistle. The whistle? Next, water was being added to
the boiler from a jerry can through the whistle connection.

This was too much. I broke my silence and asked, ‘Why
don’t you use the injector?’ A Penberthy injector was piped
up to what turned out to be a rectangular water tank beneath the
seat.

‘We can’t get it to work,’ replied John Behre, its
owner. By now the filling was completed and the whistle returned to
its rightful place and the fire again lighted. I probably should
have accepted his answer and let it go at that. Not me, I’ve
got to get involved and most times I figure that ‘no’ or
‘can’t’ is not an acceptable answer when the innate
cussedness of inanimate objects such as an injector is
involved.

Should have stayed home.

I nursed that injector and used every trick that I knew and
tried to remember a few from ‘Why The Injector Don’t
Work’ (Mac Taylor, IMA January/February 1988). It would pick up
nicely, the overflow shut off and the boiler check open momentarily
then slam shut again with water again coming out the overflow. I
finally had to give up, at least temporarily, for I was already
late for a date to take my wife to dinner so I hurried off.

‘Once late, a bit later is not going to be noticed’ was
the rationale used while I pawed through back issues of IMA looking
for November/December 1987 and the centerfold material on the
Penberthy injector. This we intended to drop off enroute to the
restaurant hoping that it might contain an answer for the equally
mystified steam enthusiasts.

My wife walked over to the group with me. They were again
filling the boiler through the whistle opening. She looked around
and spotted the principals involved and remarked, ‘Who would
have thought that there would be two steam nuts within a block of
each other in this town?’

John and his helpers have since taken that injector apart,
cleaned it, lapped the seats and put it back together. It still did
not work. Now it simply had to be something besides the injector
and it was.

The rig was originally built by John’s father, the late John
Behre, Sr. After his death it remained in the family garage and
workshop until recently when John Jr. decided to get the ‘steam
car’ into operation again. The boiler needed retubing and so
was removed for that job. After hours of knuckle-skinning work in
the cramped quarters of the firebox, the job was completed. When it
was again mounted on the chassis and piped up it was like the boy
that took the alarm clock apart and when he put it back together
again he had a few parts left over. Somehow the piping between the
injector and the boiler check valve didn’t get put back the
same way it came off.

For some reason the elbow that had been against the check valve
was replaced with a tee. The run of the tee had a 6′ nipple and
a gate valve added so the boiler could be filled from a hose.

What was happening was that this added nipple and valve acted
like a surge chamber and this was preventing the even flow of high
velocity water to the check valve. By very carefully throttling the
injector’s water inlet valve I had been able to reach a point
where a very small amount of water was entering the boiler while at
the same time much water was issuing from the overflow and the
overflow valve and the check valves were giving off a humming sound
as they did a dance tuned to the cavity of the added nipple.

I wasn’t the one to figure out the answer. It was John who
finally put all of the facts together, including trying to remember
how it was piped up in the first place. The piping was taken apart
and redone with just a straight horizontal run from the injector to
an elbow at the boiler check valve. After that it ran perfectly.
Anyway, all you Iron-Men, here’s one for the books. It is
important that the run from the injector to the boiler be direct
and without any branch piping.

The late John Behre Sr. was a steam man from many years back.
His early collection of steam equipment was the subject of a
photograph in the September/October 1967 IMA (p. 47). One day while
visiting a Morristown, New Jersey junkyard he caught the
‘junkie’ cutting up, of all things, a Stanley Steamer! The
body was gone and he was about to tackle the engine next when John
Sr. rescued this twin cylinder 3′ x 5′ engine. That was in
1967. By the early 70’s he had built the ‘steam car’
that I had met head-on in the church yard.