Axeman Anderson 1959 130M

One other thing I did to day;

This morning I read through this thread again. It is about the problems a member had with his 260M. He had loads of unburnt and partly burn coal in the ash pan.
Post by LsFarm - Axeman Anderson 260M Success.. Finally

It turned out that the boiler walls were not letting the fire migrate out of the center. This left the perimeter of the fire to cool to burn coal. This is more of a 260M thing and seems to only apply to a newly started fire.

It did get me thinking about how the boiler walls in these boilers keep the perimeter of the fire cooler than the center. After I got the 130M fired back up today, I took my 1/8th" rod and poked around the perimeter of the fire.

What I felt when poking in there was what seemed to be coal stuck onto the boiler walls. I think I got it all off. But I can now see how that might cause the perimeter of the fire to be cooler that normal and cause the ash problems I have.

-Don

Overnight and since we fired it back up we have gotten 6.5 hours of run time on it. Everything is set back to normal now on this cold morning.

The videos of our cleaning project are up for your viewing pleasure.


-Don

OK we've given it a 24 hours of hard running to straiten itself out.

Now we start over. Ashing temperature set at 130. Clock set at 1200. .
I put a 5" pulley on the gearbox to slow the auger down a bit. This is just an experiment to see if we really need to turn the auger that fast. This also slows down the ashing so we are running with the ashing speed maxed out, 3 teeth with an occasional 4th tooth. .
I don't know how much coal we have gone through over the past month but it sure looks like a LOT! We might need to get another ton before Winter.

-Don

I know I should be leaving it alone for a couple of days to sort itself out but I just couldn't resist!

It ran for over three hours overnight. It was kind of cold but not three hours of run time cold. A lot of black rocks and ash for one night of run time. I decided to explore another possibility. My thinking is, if coal can get stuck to the cool boiler walls, it could get stuck to the grate too. I pulled the grate panel and ran a 3" bar in through the bottom of the grate. It was pretty tough to poke through so there may have been coal stuck to it. I don't really know for sure though. This is what came out. Then I fired it up and had a look up in there. The left side looks a bit on the cool side fire wise. That got me thinking about the fact that this side of the fire always looks cooler than the other. after it ran for a while I decided to try something new to trouble shoot this problem.

McGiever suggested earlier to push a rod down into the fire, leave it for a minute then pull it out and use it like a "Dipstick" to see how deep the fire is. I took this one step further and tested both sides at the boiler wall. One side came out nice and Red the other side is not.

I ran the rod and then a poker down the cool side to un-stick whatever is in there. The cool side is the same side as the boiler bypass. I decided to shut that off until we figure this out just in case it is part of the problem.

OK, now to go out and put another heavy load on the boiler!

-Don

After about 30 minutes of run time I went out to check on it.

I have never, ever seen ash temperature this high before, 220 degrees! I hope that's a good thing. I hope that means the fire is completely and evenly settled down on the grate. About 15 minutes later the temperature came down low enough for it to start ashing.

One other thing I forgot to mention is I switched the gearbox pulley back to the original 3" last night. I figured I did't want to add another variable to cause problems.

-Don

We managed to get it to run for a little over 3 hours this afternoon. I decided to take Pete Axemans advice and just set the Anthrastat to 140. I did a lot of aggressive manual ashing to keep the full width of the fire down on the grate. This made the ashing temp go way up. .
One very interesting point is that even though we did all that aggressive ashing, and it ashed on its own some of the time, this is all that came out. Compared with last nights 3 hour run time this is way, way less ash!

Hopefully we have it right now. Next, we wait at least a couple days to see what the ash looks like.

I have a bunch of videos to upload. I took a page from H'B.'s analysis book and got video of the fire from underneath.
-Don

After looking at the videos, and seeing that one side of the fire was colder than the other, I noticed the cooler side has clinkers in it.

In this video you can see a clinker on the left side. It looks like it was probably stuck to the boiler wall before I scraped it loose.


After the poking and scraping, in this video you can see that it is gone and the fire is hot on both sides.


Then I realized that I never scraped or cleaned the bottom of the fire chamber. I took a look back and in PT11 of the playlist there is a shot of the bottom of the fire chamber. It has a lot of crusted on rust and crap. I now think that I should have cleaned it off because this is giving clinkers a very convenient place to adhere themselves.

I don't know if we have the problem cured yet. We may have to pull the grate this weekend and give the fire chamber a good scraping if it doesn't straiten itself out.

-Don

I’m staying tuned!!

My boiler sat cold this summer with last years ash and coal in it, and I just relit it when fall came around.. talk about a recipe for rust flakes and clinker catchers!

Humm, "Clinker Catchers", that about sums it up, I like that name.

I didn't really think about it when I was cleaning it up. I now think that these Clinker Catchers can get a significant amount of material stuck to them preventing heat transfer into the boiler. If you ever saw the inside of an old hand fired boiler, there is usually thick deposits like this stuck to the firebrick.

-Don

Well it seems like you are on the right track to getting this issue straightened out. Looks like we have some cold nights ahead of here in central pa for the next week or so.

Indeed Zig, That we do, throw a few snow flakes and ice pellets in there too!

We are ready to look at some ash. It ran for 11 hours over the past 2 days. I don't think that has improved because it's colder now than when it was running for 3.5 to 4 hours per day. One thing that is VERY different now is the actual ash temperature. When I installed this ash thermometer it always read within 10 degrees of the Anthrastat set-point no matter what the set-point was. Now, since we poked and scraped the insides some, it will go up to over 200 degrees after sitting for a while. .
The ash itself looks better. But there is still a good bit of partly burnt coal in it. 26 pounds of ash over 11 hours run time. Assuming 11.5 pounds per hour feed rate, 126.5 pounds and 21% ash. Not too bad but could be better. At this 140 degree ashing temperature it keeps a lot of black rocks up on top. In another thread some of the AHS guys have been showing where there ashing temperature probes are mounted. I have been wondering why the AHS seems to run lower ashing temperature than the Axeman Anderson. From looking at these pictures, I think the reason is the Axeman probe is closer to the ash than on the AHS. We will have to measure this one and compare.

-Don

I am seeing pretty much the same results.

Reading through the original Bureau of Mines report on the Anthratube I noticed there was not less than 25% combustible in the ash with any of the pea coal tests and some were over 50%. Buck showed much less "leftovers", some in the low teens. I'm thinking what you're seeing is perfectly normal and acceptable, no? Just a nature of the beast, so to speak.

Chris

Don, the video from the ash chamber disturbs me. I have never seen even a gentle glow from the fire from below on mine. It should be sitting over several inches of ash. Can you go through your startup routine again just to clarify?

Coaledsweat..

I believe that was when he did the “LsFarm fix” of slicing through the fire bed and cleaning out the end of the ash grate and running the boiler wide open to establish a full fire.

Mine looked the same way after I did the “LsFarm fix”, but now it is back to normal, I only see a slight glow underneath after a good pull and ashing.