Sold May 2006 Back to Archive

I've often thought that the best bit of my job is having the opportunity to meet some seriously capable engineers and share a cup of tea in their workshop (makes up for some of the incapable ones…).

The gentleman who was building this Foster is still working in the same workshop he moved in to fifty years ago. He had a working lifetime of building, tuning, repairing and selling motorbikes, including twelve years working for Tom Arter in the 1950s and early 60s, with visits to the Isle of Man each year with the team's bikes. Now retired, the workshop is still buzzing with activity with several bikes currently under restoration and more, completed ones lined up along the back wall. He had a diversion for a while into stationary engines and has a small collection (including a lovely little open crank Ruston that his father bought), then got into building Stuart engines. Having done a sufficiency of steam engines, he is now nearing completion of a third scale open crank oil engine.

He started the Foster in the 1980s, buying all the castings and setting to in the workshop. In due course, the design was sold on to Live Steam Models, the current owners, from whom he ordered a boiler. Work has progressed on and off since but now the whole project has become too big and heavy for a man well into his retirement years. He's actually been talking about passing it on to a younger builder for some years - we first spoke about it when I was still at Reading and, each time we talked on the phone he worked on for another few months and completed a bit more. If he could have hung on for another couple of years I'm sure I'd have bought a cracking finished engine!

So, this is a part-built four inch scale Foster, work to date comprises:

· Steel boiler with expanded steel tubes by Live Steam Models, with hydraulic test certificate
· Hornplates complete with all bearings and caps
· Complete set of gearing, including differential
· Rear axle with keyways cut
· Set of wheel rims with T-rings welded in, laser cut spokes
· Rear hubs machined
· Front hubs machined with spokes fitted
· Set machined hubcaps
· Cylinder block machined, finished liner to be fitted
· Part-machined governor
· Crankshaft complete with valve eccentric straps and sheaves
· Water pump part-machined, complete with ram
· Flywheel machined
· Connecting rod complete with big end assembly
· Second shaft complete
· Smokebox, door with maker's plate, door handles and dart, perch bracket, spud pan and front axle assembly
· Trunk guide with piston rod and crosshead
· Tender plates cut, to be formed
· Expansion link, die block, lifting links, weighshaft lifting lever
· Reversing lever assembly, stainless steel handle
· Regulator handle assembly
· Weighshaft bracket part machined, reach rod finished
· Ashpan with damper
· Firehole door with inner baffle and hinge
· Safety valve assembly complete except for valve bobbins
· Spectacle plate and rear bulkhead
· Steering shaft, worm and wheel

There is a large quantity of small completed components, a Foster boiler transfer and a complete set of drawings.

Work is to a high standard throughout, as to be expected a man who started as an apprentice machinist sixty years ago and has been in the workshop pretty much continuously since.