A Great Day Today When I Ordered The Little Samson Traction Engine Boiler

Continuing with the story of building the 6″ scale Little Samson Traction Engine model at my model engineering workshop in Thailand. With the castings now on a ship bound for Thailand it was time to turn my attention to obtaining the boiler which I would be unable to do myself because of all the stringent requirements of insurance companies for pressel vessel manufacture.

On Tuesday 13 May 2014, I had a telephone call from Tony Baldwin of AJB Engineering in response to a message I had left him on his answerphone.

Ajb Engineering (Ripley) Ltd is a company that is well respected for making large traction engine boilers and was recommended to me by Edward George of Little Samson Models (where I bought my Little Samson Traction Engine castings).

We discussed building the boiler and Tony said that he could build it for me but that it would take up to 9 months before it was ready.

Tony explained that it only takes two to three weeks to build the boiler but he needs to get a batch of six to eight boilers finished so that RSA Inspector can inspect them all at the same time. This saves a vast amount of money – to have individual inspections for each boiler would be prohibitively expensive Tony said.

(At the time I hadn’t heard of RSA but assumed they were the boiler inspectors. A quick search on the internet found the RSA website. It seems that RSA is a huge inspection company created in 1996 following the merger of two of the largest insurance companies in the UK, Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance.)

By the way my father used to be a boiler and pressure vessel inspector for Sun Alliance. I guess that’s where I got my engineering tendencies from.

Tony quoted me a price for the boiler which was within my expectations and the next day Wednesday 14 May 2014 I sent off a cheque for 20% of the total price as a deposit.

My boiler for the half-size Little Samson Traction Engine was now on order!

I have also arranged to go to see Tony next Thursday. I found out that Ajb Engineering is at Codnor only about 10 miles from my house in Nottingham.

Some Facts About The 6″ Little Samson Traction Engine Boiler

Here are some facts about the boiler for the 6 inch Little Samson Boiler to give you an indication of the size:-

And here are a couple of photos of a 6 inch scale Little Samson boiler made by AJB Engineering:-

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(With thanks to Edward George of Little Samson Models Website)