Stirlingengineforum.com

If you have one of those old school hardware stores in town that have all those bins of small parts you can get a brass bushing and some tubing that fits. I've had real good luck using it. While your there, look at all their little parts and you may find other things that are cheap and useful.

Glad to hear you got it to run, neat huh? I'd say your top and bottom plates would do better with aluminum. It also sounds like maybe your displacer isn't fully bottoming out at each end of the stroke? You mention increasing the stroke there, it should pretty much touch at each end without causing f...

Ice works well especially for first runs or when your having trouble with a new design. It will help you from adding too much heat to get it started. Just keep the melting water out of the inside! I needed ice to get my first engine running the first couple times until I fixed all the lttle things l...

Oh, my bad. I've seen the whole engine pictures in another thread already, sawblade flywheel right?

I love the pictures, what does the whole thing look like?

Local hardware stores often carry plate aluminum and this place has all kinds of things on-line http://www.mcmaster.com/

tmk, From what I've seen, all the LTD's in the small model variety are gamma's. It's always fun to make something new or different even if it doesn't work any better only that it in fact just works. The problem I see with adding electical actuators to a Stirling would be that I expect the engine to ...

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think a Stirling that is running has almost no compression since it is basically a one stroke engine cycle. Hot pushing out and cold drawing back in. However, a cold, not running Stirling will have compression when it's spun by hand due to it being a sealed system. You ...

Alpha, The ratio 1.5 to 1 I believe is for the best efficientcy for power produced by a typical Stirling cycle engine. This seems to be a base line to work with. LTD Stirling's use a much larger displacer to power cylinder volume. Mine have been about 10 to 1 and run well on very little heat. Your r...

A real kick in the pants getting your first one running huh? The usual responce from those around you are that they think you lost your mind. Yes, a very personal experience indeed! Glad to hear I was of some help. The first one is often ugly and while the urge to build a second engine is strong, it...

Okay, just keep your fingers clear when it's running! Maybe you can use it to cut firewood? LOL, j/k

A power piston with each side connected to hot and cold respectively will work and there are some out there in production units I believe. To make one home built can be done but it's no doubt more difficult. I have thought about some designs that would work that way but I have not attempted to build...

Roger, You will get a piston with a hole in it like you see on the specs page at Airpot. I attached a piece of thin sheet metal bent like a letter "U" and drilled a hole for a wrist pin. (piano wire from hardware store) I soldered a nut on the bottom of the "U" and used a screw t...

I bought two of the K240 (I think it had a "K" in it) sets. I used one set on my second engine that you can see here http://nevadasteve.tripod.com/whatsstevesworldlikethesedays/id1.html It worked very well. I even dropped one of the pistons and distorted it a little, I sanded it back to sh...

You need it to be light weight and very easy to move. There should be enough space between it and the walls of the displacer chamber to allow the air to pass without creating vacuum or compression but not too much or you will have air space that does no work (dead air) Styro foam, insulating foam bo...