I bought this engine on ebay at 15-04-2007 for only £18.00
It was very cheap because it didn't look very good, and it was bdaly described , the actual auction title was "LIVE STEAM SINGLE CYLINDER and BOILER"

When I received it, it looked quite sad, someone must have dropped something heavy on it

Bowman of Luton PW201

Bowman of Luton PW201

Bowman of Luton PW201

It's been quite a while since I received this engine, but the restororation of it is finaly finished. First thing I did is disamble the whole engine, on the images below you can see how badly the firebox was damaged

damaged firebox

You can also see that he firebox was riveted to the baseplate, so I had to drill those out to get it off.

firebox

The boiler was pretty dirty, but nothing some brasso couldn't get rid of

boiler

The first challeng was to get the firebox in good shape again. I wasn't sure if it was possible to get it right again, and thought that it would be a better idea to look for a spare one (although that would be a difficult task), but the metal of the firebox was quite soft alluminium (probably teh reason why this firebox was damaged in the first place), so I decided to first have a go at trying to straighten things out.

I took the firebox appart in three pieces, and placed them in a vice between two pieces of wood, the result was quite pleasing:

Straightened back piece of the firebox

Pretty straight! so I continued with the front piece:

Straightened front piece of the firebox

That one didn't turn out 100% straight, but good enough I thought.On the image below you can se the difference between the straightened out part and the part that still needs to be done

firebox with let part straigtened out

After all parts where straigh again, I reassambled the firebox, and sanded the pieces down for painting

stripped firebox

I used VHT brake caliper paint on this one, it should be able to withstand high temperatures and is glosy (unlike the matt black paint I used on engines before). After painting it looked like this:

Finished firebox

With the firebox in good shape again, I had the most difficult part of this restoration finished, and it was a lot easyer that I thought. With that done, I started polishing the boiler. I decided to desolder the steam pipe that goes to the cylinder, since it was already resoldered by someone else before, and it would make polishing and painting easier (or so I thought...). After some polishing, the boiler looked like this:

polished boiler

Quite a diference to what I started with. What still was bothering me about this restoration was that I was missing both the burner and the chimney, so when another bad looking PW201 showed up on ebay, I didn't had to think very long and I bought it too. When it arrived it was a poor looking thing:

My spare PW201

Thick layers of red paint everywhere, nasty dents in the boiler (I even suspect it to have ben soldered open totaly, and cutted into a sheet from below once) and even dents in the baseplate, the baseplate also had more holes than it should have. I was happy that I only bought it for spares,  restoring this engine wouldn't have been fun. 

Now that I had that engne, it was time for some more painting. Since I wasn't sure about what to do with the spare parts from the second machine, I decided to paint them as well, so that I could later pick out the best parts.

painted baseplates

It took me some time to get the right kind of paint for this eninge,I ended up using "camouflage green", which is a pretty close match (not 100% though) After the baseplates it was time for the small parts:

stripped small parts

Funny detail is that with two idenical engines, the pipework was made from diferend materials. And here thay are in the right color again:

painted small parts

Soldered in pipe

Finished engine

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