Last part of March, 2021 fellow Steam Locomobile Replicar builder Jim Trotta and his lovely wife Terri stopped by on his way home from Florida to New Jersey. Jim built one of the Series 1 Likamobiles and has quite a depth of knowledge on these steam cars. First off he says Likamobile and I say Lykamobile :) but it is all the same fun!
Jim came up with a circuit board that replaced the Series 1 circuitry. He made improvements and added a few additional areas to monitor. Our Series 2 Lykamobile removed all of the electronics and relies on manual and visual observations of the boiler. I accidentally overheated my boiler and caused me to re-seat every copper tube (288 of them) on both ends. There is an earlier post detailing this so I won't go into details. Anyway here is a picture of Jim's circuit board that I have mounted under the seat.
In a previous post I detailed using a different circuit board that would be an emergency cut-off of the boiler if the water level goes too low. The following picture shows the manifold with 4 spark plugs as the sensors. I reused this manifold with Jim's circuit board.
Jim's circuit board replaced the original Series 1 electronics and was mounted in a brass console on the passenger side floor board area. This would have been a bit more work, I took the easy way out and mounted the board sort of out of the way. The features that I was most keen to use that Jim's circuit board would allow is to first have a low water cut-off and secondly allow for automatic filling of the boiler via a solenoid actuated valve. This solenoid valve cuts off the bypass water and diverts the water to fill the boiler. The way Jim's board works is that a valve is actuated when the top LED (green one third row from the left) goes off. The valve closes and fills the boiler until the green LED turns back on.
The first row of lights is a battery voltage monitor (which we do have next to our battery), the second row of lights is to monitor the water tank level (I don't use this section).
The two red LED's on the right with the top one indicates when the solenoid valve is actuated and the bottom red LED blinks when your fuel tank is low (I have mounted a stainless steel float in my diesel tank - I check it once when steaming up to see if the LED is blinking). I have mounted an LED light on the dash board to turn on when the solenoid bypass valve has been actuated and it is pretty bright so that I can get some reassurance that the bypass solenoid valve is working. Below is a video of the LED showing when the top spark plug is disconnected the valve will be actuated and water diverts into the boiler to fill it.
Jim helped me figure out all of the connection details for the circuit board and helped troubleshoot my work - eventually we got it all to work.
Once we got everything working, Jim took out his Likamobile Surrey that he has built and we went over all of the modifications and improvements he has made over the years. Jim's Likamobile started out as a two seater, but unfortunately while he was trailering the car, someone rear ended him and totaled his Likamobile. Not being deterred, Jim decided to take this as an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better! Below are a few pictures of us showing off our steam cars and finally two videos of my Lykamobile steaming away and coming back.
Jim's car was in-between repairs so he wasn't able to fire it up. I'm hoping that this fall on his way down to Florida we can fire up both for a little spin. Below are two videos of my Lykamobile.
Happy Steaming!!!
