Water Water Everywhere Water !

I have had two issues over the past year with the Lyka. One day I discovered a puddle under my Lyka that shouldn't have been there. Now this replica of the 1899-1903 Locomobile is prone to dripping water, oil and even some diesel fuel if everything isn't tight, but this puddle was different. Upon further investigation I could see that my tanks were dripping from a few weldments. After discussing with Steam Traction World, they were as perplexed and me. I use well water and my only thoughts are that these tanks do not like my water. I also discovered that the pipe threads had deteriorated too. My only solution was to clean the tanks as best as I could and seal the tanks with POR 15 fuel tank sealer. I also had to use thread inserts to fix the pipe threads. Below are a few pictures showing the issue. Everything is all back together with no leaking. 

My Second issue just happened this week. I was preparing the Lyka for our annual Town's Christmas Parade. Steamed her up, drove her around a bit, then loaded her onto my trailer to transport to the parade a couple of days earlier for the parade. I have a place to store the Lyka close to the parade. The Lyka ran just fine going up on the trailer, however when I arrived where I was going to store the Lyka, she began to buck just a bit and run rough. I had a feeling that the timing somehow was a little off. I loaded the Lyka back up and took her back to my shop. Did a re-timing and still she was bucking a bit. I jacked up one wheel and ran the engine trying to listen and see if anything to explain the rough running. Then all of a sudden, the engine smoothed out - that was odd I thought, until I realized the Lyka was spilling water out the back. I burst the copper tubing that goes from the hand pump to the feed pump.

Now what caused that! I decided to disassemble the feed pump to see if I could find a blockage. What I discovered is that the two ball check valve stops had become loose and were not in their proper 1.5mm distant from the ball.

You can see the jam nut has loosen and the other M6 hex head screw has loosened away too. This is not good. Below is a diagram I drew up of how the feed pump should be. When the pump piston goes up the left ball will close and the right ball will rise, opening up for water to be drawn in from the tanks. Once the pump piston starts to transverse down the right ball will seat itself closing off the tanks and the left ball will rise allowing the water to go to the boiler or bypass circuit. The hand pump prevents water from escaping in that direction too - basically a dead end.

In the next diagram you see the left ball has been jammed shut by the M6 screw loosening up and resting on top of the ball. This prevents the water from exiting out the feed pump to the boiler or bypass circuit. Water is not very compressible so when the pump piston goes down it is pressuring the hand pipe tubing and causing the engine to buck like hitting a brick wall. The copper tubing actually expanded over much of its length going from about 3/8 inch diameter to close to 1/2 inch diameter (about 0.45 in places). Finally, the copper tube burst open.

I have put in a request to STW to purchase a new LK1556 copper pipe. Hopefully they can make one up for me soon.

So for any other Lyka builder reading this....Use Loctite or some type of thread lock to fix the adjustable M6 screws in place. The instructions don't say anything in this regard, but knowing now what has happened, thread locker is required.