Hand-made oilers, February 2009:

The final stage of restoring the 122 was to make some oilers with taps and to make an exhaust tube to connect the engine to the chimney.

For the oilers, I obtained some 3/4 inch diameter brass tubing cut to the correct height and some brass sheet. I pre-cut the sheet into a disk shape and formed the sheet into the caps using two wooden formers. I had to anneal the sheet 3 to 4 times to make the final shape. I only had one failure and that was because I was hammering the cap against a brick rather then wood.

Next the oiler tubes. These were made from solid brass rod with a hole drilled down the center. A smaller hole was drilled through the rod to take the tap. I bought a hand reamer for 1 penny from ebay to ream the hole. I used a good old fashioned hand drill to drill holes along the rod. The taps were fun to make. Rather then using an electric drill, I used a hand drill. The drill was held in a workmate. Turning the drill with my left hand, I fashioned the tap from a solid brass rod (which was held in the drill chuck) with a file with my right hand. This was a pretty long-winded approach and took about 2 hours to make a tap. The final stage was to drill the holes in the tap ... one partly along the length of the bottom part of the tap, the other at right angles to align with the hole in the oiler tube. Once I'd drilled the hole in the bottom of the tap, I put the tap into the oiler tube, held it in a vice and drilled down the existing hole in the oiler tube into the tap. Perfect alignment of holes. Finally, I heated the 'stem' part of the tap and bent to shape.

I didn't have any original oilers to work against so I can't tell whether mine are 'Bowman' correct or not. I suspect that they are not 100% accurate ... they may be too big or too wide or have caps that are slightly domed rather than being flat and the metal used was probably too thick. Never-the-less, they look the part and I'm pretty chuffed with the result

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