African Queen Engine

African Queen Engine
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Looking at the listing on the right hand of this blog I see that the African Queen hasn’t merited enough mentions, so as my output this week has been negligible I’ll fill you in on some of the progress.

The boat is pretty plain other than the centrepiece, a steam engine.

Now I’m no engineer as you’ve probably realised so the engine used is as provided in the kit – a fake.

The boiler is made of tube that looks like it came from a Scandinavian DIY store. Much of the metalwork is wood apart from a few plastic mouldings and the odd brass bit.

For a boat made famous in a film, you would have thought the research would have been easy. All you do is watch the movie and base the kit on that. No chance, the boiler is too tall and thin. The castings for the cylinder are fluted whereas the prototype ones aren’t. Looking at the plan, pipework sprouts in all directions compared to the simplicity of reality. Event the cover beside the flywheel is wrong – you can’t balance a cup of tea on the kit version (which I need to fix) like the actors do !

So I grabbed some stills from the DVD and based my version on this. It’s not prefect but once on the water it still looks the part. I need to work out how to motorise the unit, and the instructions don’t help much, but one day I’ll figure out something.