Mamod SP5
I bought this SP5 in january of 2008 for £27.08, wich is quite a reasonable price for a SP5, but this one was in prety bad condition. When you look at the images below, you can make a judgement for youself, but it's prety obvious that it will be quite a challenge to get this engine back into shape.
SP5
SP5

SP5
SP5

The pipework is broken on all 7 joints.
pipework
pipework

Boiler sight glass isn't very good either
Boiler sight glass
Boiler sight glass


what needs to be done:

- resolder the tread of the whistle (it's loose now)
- repaint everything
- replace sight glass
- find replacements for the chimney, chrome sides and reverse lever
- clean everything up
 
Update 22-06-2008
Over the last couple of months i've been quite busy with this engine. The first thing I did was strip it al apart.

his engijne had quite a lot of part, and I had to rapeint the whole engine. Not the easiest engine to do that with, because there where 4 colors required: red, blue, silver and black. So after getting teh old paint off

I could paint it all over, and the result looked like this:


After he paintwork, I had to start with the more difficult parts, like the chrome sides of the firebox. Since the SP5 is still made (in a slightly different version) I thought I could just buy new chrome sides and use them for the engine, since I figured the old ones where beyond repair. I contacted Paper 'n' Steam Galore, and they also told me the new SP5 sides would fit. So together with the other parts I needed I ordered the new sides. Unfortunately when I received them I quickly found out that they where all wrong, they didn't fit at all and where badly scratched too, this is what they looked like:
New SP5 chrome sides
New SP5 chrome sides

So I returned them to the shop and had to figure out how to deal with the firebox sides. With some searching I found some chrome paint, and after some testing, the chrome sides came out like this:
Chrome sides
Chrome sides

Looks pretty good I think, but I have to see weither it will be able to withstand the heat of the fire. I baked the apint so I hope that will help. After that I had to get soldering, first thing to do was the tread of the whistle, so I had to get the end cap off:

With that removed, I could resolder if from the inside. Next part to resolder was the pipes to the engine frame, at fist I did it wrong, the pipes where not soldered on straight:

But I was able to resolve that. After that I had to solder the pipe to the boiler and assemble the whole thing again. Getting the firebox installed again was realy a difficult job! only the front of the firebox is screwed in, the rest of it is kind of clamped together, you kind of need three hands to do that. All that's now left to be done is getting a new burner and making a reverse lever.
 
Update 05-01-2009
A while ago I finished the restoration of this engine, the end result looked like this:
SP5
SP5

It looked pretty good, compared to what it was when I got it. Unfortunately it didn't work the way it should.

I painted the chrome sides, and cured the paint, but it couldn't withstand the heat of the flames, the paint wend bubbling:

That wasn't the worst thing, because while trying to steam it, I also found out that I blocked one of the pipes, so I couldn't get it working at all.

I'll give this engine some time on the shelf now, before I start over again.
 
Update 28-08-2010

The above restoration was done almost 2 years ago. Whin it failed, I was quite fed up with is, so the enghine was shelved for about 2 years.

Right now I thought it was about to start the re-restoration of this engine.

In the mean time I was able to buy a new engine unit on ebay, consiting of the engine baseplate (the silver pice), engine brackets, pipework, pistons and cylinders. This was a nice piece to solve my blocked pipes issue.

I also found out that the brand VHT did also sell heat proof silver paint which I could use for the chrome sides. Ofcourse real chroning would be better, but after consulting several companies about that I found out that chroming would be (way) more expensive than what the whole engine was worth.

There where a few things that needed to be done:

- Repaint the baseplate again, I last time used a satin finish by accident, and that just didn't look the way I wanted it.
- Repaint the firebox chrome side with heat resistant silver paint.
- Repaint the black firebox parts, since they gathered some rust in the dampy shed where I left it for a while.
- Drill out all pop rivets and replace them with copper ones, using metal ones like I did the last time wasn't a good idea, I really need to use copper ones, because the metal ones rusted right out of it.

So first off it was time to get rid of the paint again:


Soon enough the base looked very nice again:


And here you can see all parts waiting for assembly:


One of the harder parts was getting the right rivets for the sight glass. For one or another reason the holes in the faceplate of the boier where quite a lot bigger than the "mamod rivets" that are sold on ebay. I eventually ended up with copper rivets that have a metal inside, they worked fine but look a little bit oversized.

After assembly, the engine looked like this:


Quite a pleasing result, but the real question ofcourse was: would it run...?
The answer is yes! But unfortunately, even the VHT paint couldn't resist the heat.


I guess there's just nothing you can do about that, even the original SP5's have problems with that, so I just have to leave it like that (quite hard for a perfectionist like me :) )

On the left you can find a video of the engine running.