Axeman Anderson 1959 130M

Those pesky aquastat's can cause some real headaches when they act up. Hopefully that fixes it for you.

Hello Don,

Do you use electric contact cleaner at all for your boiler controls?
I was also wondering if you are using the Honeywell conductive paste
for the thermocouple on your honeywell triple aquastats?

lzaharis wrote: ↑

Sat. Oct. 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Hello Don,

Do you use electric contact cleaner at all for your boiler controls?
I was also wondering if you are using the Honeywell conductive paste
for the thermocouple on your honeywell triple aquastats?

The contact cleaner won't do you any good. You can't get to the contacts unless you completely disassemble the aquastat, which I have. The contacts are arced up a bit so they would require filing to clean them up. I don't think that was the real problem anyway, I've seen worse that work fine.

I do not use the thermal past. It only buys you a couple degrees of accuracy which I can live without. It's pretty messy stuff too. If I was a normal person and just installed these things and left them alone, I would use the past. But since I am always play'in around, I don't.

-Don

Here's the aquastat innards. These are the LO Limit contacts. as you can, see they are a bit arced but they should still work. I don't think that is the problem with this aquastat. I don't see anything else wrong so, this one is now in the "parts" pile. Sorry, still not able to upload photos properly.

EDIT:
My uploading and "Quote" function problems, are actually some setting in Firefox. I switched to Edge and it all works. Still working on figuring what's up with Firefox.

I re-connected the HI Limit aquastat.
The HI Limit is in series with the stoker kill switch, pretty simple. I hope to be able to use the LO side to operate a dump zone. -Don

The ash is still kind of rocky and heavy. I took your advice Lee and reduced the ashing to 2 teeth from 3+ teeth. I would think that raising the ashing temperature would make this worse, maybe I'm wrong? The fire is very much on the high side right now so we could try it. Right now we are at about 100.

This is pretty strange because on my other Axeman, we didn't ever have rocks, it was always ash and fluffy clinckers.

I put up a video that starts out with how the ashing gear is turned by the drive pawl, ashing lever and auger cam.


-Don

EDIT:
I just looked back through the other Axeman records and it looks like we settled at 135 degree ashing temperature. It looks like this also gave it the best fuel mileage. This was after trying lower temps, 110, 115, 125 and 130. We are going to set it to 130 for a couple days to see what happens.

We've made a couple of changes this week.

We put a 9/16th" hole in the fire door to let in a little overfire air. This was recommended by Pete Axeman. He said if your Pea coal is a little undersized (mine is) this will help it burn better. Since we are running on the LO Limit of the aquastat, I realized that we don't need to run a triple aquastat. So in the interest of simplicity, I installed a little 4006A set at 160. It works perfectly. And we hooked the clock up again. This week we also did some work on the ashing temperature. We started at 130 with a clean ash pan. The next day we swapped in a new ash pan and bumped the ashing temp up 10 degrees. Same thing the next day and so on... More on that later.

I put up a video of the bottom of the fire. Ya don't get to see that very often!

I think we will try to do one of these while it's ashing.

-Don

Rob R. wrote: ↑

Fri. Oct. 26, 2018 8:55 pm

Don, what does the AA manual suggest for an ashing temperature?

It says, " for normal Winter operation, with average fuel, set it at 140. In Summer it can be set as low as 120 but should never be set so low that it doesn't ash at all".

I ran it up to 160, then back down. We are currently at 150.

-Don

140 winter and 120 summer is the same advice seen in my Coal Gun manual. And AHS applies 10 degrees of hysteresis at the factory.

Is there a means to adjust hysteresis on an AA? If not, what is the "fixed" hysteresis value? If it is "fixed", my first guess would be 10 degrees.

A setting of 120 degrees with 10 degrees of hysteresis, and a setting of 110 degrees with 1 degree of hysteresis is essentially the same setting. The advantage of the 110/1 setting is a much lower chance of witnessing a puff-back.

That's a whopper load of unburned coal in the ash pan image above. How many consecutive days old is the fire that is resulting in such ash?

The image reminds me of the first ash load I see after starting a fresh fire, when I begin from 100% fresh coal and add no ashes ahead of the coal at the start-up.

That unburned may be from the restart?

lsayre wrote: ↑

Sat. Oct. 27, 2018 6:21 am

That's a whopper load of unburned coal in the ash pan image above. How many consecutive days old is the fire that is resulting in such ash?

That is a full week after a restart. Before we started turning the ashing temp up, a lot of the black stuff was raw coal. The black stuff you see now is partly burnt coal, it's lighter than raw coal.

From the first fire up, this Axeman has had very different ash than the other one. Even when starting the fire on a bed of ash, it will spit out raw coal. Turning the ashing temp up has helped but we still don't have complete burn out.

The first part of our ashing experiment was, at a setting of 2 teeth and ashing at 130, check the ash after 24 hours, then bump the ashing to 140, check after 24 hours and so on. We went up to 160, 160 was the best looking ash.

The second part of the experiment is, at a setting of 3 teeth and ashing at 140, follow the same stepped process above. This time we are going from 140 to 170 since in the first part 160 was best.

One thing that I think is throwing a wrench into the works is most of the heat calls that I have observed only last about 5 minutes or so. After about 1 minute in, the ashing kicks on and continues until the end. I would think this would cancel out the effect of turning the ashing temp up as there is not enough time to complete an ashing cycle.

-Don

Could the calibration of the thermostats be off that much? Maybe it's ashing at a much higher temp than what's indicated. I'm Just guessing....

In my mind, it doesn't really matter what the indicator says as long as the setting works correctly.

Here is a pic of the ash from the 1991 Axeman. This was at the end of the first week of running. At that point I was just beginning to learn about ashing. It came out pretty good for a Newbie, lots of powder and clinkers. Here is a pic of the ash from this 1959 Axeman. This was 2 teeth, 160 ashing. The other ash pans are 150, 140, 130 at 2 teeth. -Don