The Jensen 55 rebuild continues with making some new teflon gaskets and the general assembly of the cleaned, polished and painted parts back onto the main board with the completed engine and boiler. Two videos are also available at the end of this article to show the steam engine operating off of steam: one video demonstrates the slow-running capabilities of the engine while the other shows the engine driving a toy machine shop.
Punching some gaskets out of teflon gasket material. While thicker than the paper gaskets that Jensen uses, it's much superior in that these gaskets never seem to leak or wear out. At some point I'm going to get one of those fancy-pants Mayhew concentric punch sets. With that set, you can punch a complete gasket in one whack, but for now I will make do with the two step process of punching the outer circle and then the inner.
The white plastic board is a "self healing" backing board made for punching gaskets. It works great: giving nice, clean lines and saving the cutting edge of the punch. I will never use a piece of wood again!
All the 55's parts cleaned, polished, painted as needed and ready for assembly. The engine itself was in fine shape except for a few minor paint chips. Cleaning and lubrication was all that was required.
Here I just finished installing the Hayco strain relief for the power cord into the chimney base. The red handled pliers are a special tool made to install the Hayco strain relief and well worth getting as these connectors are total bastards to install or remove otherwise.
Boiler and engine installed as well as the name plate. Almost done!
The rebuilt engine. Looks like new!
Another shot.
I was a little excited at the first steam because I never bothered to check the boiler heating element. Sometimes you just got to have faith and it worked fine. Jensen engines and boilers are tough and you really have to try to break them. On the first run the engine was a little tight, probably just gunked-up with old oil or water scale, but after running through a few boilers of steam it cleaned out and ran nicely.
The engine running slowly. These 55's just run so smoothly
The Jensen 55 running my custom Wilesco #100 workshop.
For some reason the 55's don't seem to be as popular as the other Jensen model steam engines, but this one runs great and I highly recommend adding one to your collection.