C&L plumbers furnace won't burn (??)

That's museum quality restoration!

 

Great fettle Gary,

 

Thank you very much for the kind and generous comments, gentlemen.

I wanted to cover some details on the restoration that I thought might be of interest to fettlers. There are three subjects - the pump, the NRV and the electrolysis cleaning. I'm going to hit the first two here in this thread as two successive posts and do the electrolysis in a new thread.

The pump was very rusted. I would guess that water had sat in the pump tube at some time. The spring, washers and shaft had melded to one rusty unit.



The old pump leather had turned to sticky rust/leather paste in the bottom of the pump tube.


The pump shaft assembly was treated to a couple of days soaking in my chelating rust remover. It did a good job of removing the rust and loosening up the rust-bonded parts. But, after the rust was gone, there wasn't much left of the pump shaft!


I think you'll be able to see the spiral pattern in the pump leather end of the shaft left by the spring in this picture.


On a lark, I decided to see if I could fettle a new pump shaft. Using a piece of 1/4" (6mm) brass rod I was able to make this one.
It was far easier than I had anticipated. I chucked the rod in my drill press and ran it at about 1000rpm. I used a file to shape the pump leather end on the spinning shaft, then cleaned it up with successive grits of wet-dry sandpaper starting at 220grit and running through 600 grit. A little buffing brought up the shine. The handle end was threaded with a 1/4-20 die and the pump leather end threaded with a #10-32 die. You can see I threaded that a little crooked. Oops.

Turning parts on the drill press is a technique suggested to me by Bryan Miller (kaw550red) long ago. It worked really well.

Here's the finished pump with a passable pump leather I fettled (need a better one). I used two stainless fender washers and a stainless Nylock nut to secure them. The replacement spring is zinc-plated steel from the hardware store.



If you have need of a special pump shaft, this seems to be a viable way to go. I think you would be surprised with the ease of production.

Next up - the NRV.

Cheers,
Gary

 

The Clayton and Lambert furnace uses an NRV system where the threaded metal "nipple" the NRV pip seals against is on the bottom of the pump tube. This particular nipple was sheared at an angle and was not restorable without adding material.

I foolishly failed to get a picture of the nipple before I started work. Here, I've leveled the nipple with a file. The sheared surface ran diagonally from a high on the left to a low on the right. The small indent on the right shows where the shear ended.


Setting up to solder with a small piece of brass rod.


Soldered.


Drilled. Dang, off center.


Cleaned up with a file and some 0000 steel wool.

These are the other parts of the NRV that are original and still usable with a new nitrile NRV pip.


The repair works very well; no leakage from the NRV. My hands are not very steady anymore and I found this extremely challenging. If you have steady hands, it is not a complicated repair.

Cheers,
Gary

 

Hi Gary, excellent stuff - well done and thanks for all the tips.

Just one observation with the building up of the new NRV nipple. A different work order that might have helped would be to drill the hole in the brass rod prior to soldering. This way you would be happy the hole is centred and you could line it up with the hole in the existing part of the NRV to ensure everything is centred. After soldering a quick ream out with the correct size drill will remove any errant solder.

Isn't 20/20 hindsight on the back of someone else's hard work a wonerful thing - I bet I wouldn't have done it the way I've described straight up

 

Hello everyone, i have a couple old plumbers stoves and am having the same problem. I made a new tube where the gases come out. does anyone know the size the hole should be? Thank you!