The AM Forum

When I bought the present QTH in 1984 I knew I was getting a very old house but couldn't figure out what that strange looking "thing" was between the furnace and the oil tank.

When I was told, I was flabbergasted.  As far as I could tell, I was buying and old beat up steam engine.  I'll let you guys guess (or otherwise) what it was.  This pic was taken during the teardown of both units to make room for the current furnace.

My apologies for the quality of the picture - I had forgotten how bad things were back then until I tried to make this photo come out OK

Al

Water heater?

Probably also a water heater but most likely a boiler for old steam pipe heating system.

Wonder if it was coal fired.

(http://strawstickstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cast-iron-radiator.jpg)

Looks like a steam generator that were used to trim fat off mules skin. Lots of mule skinners up that way in the old days :D :D :D

The colorization of your photo makes the 'cellar' look more old timey. That is a really strange piece of machinery.
I'll say a fuel burner powered water heater. The furnace has a gauge for the heating plant and that would be separate from domestic water, "back-in-the-day"
I rented a farm house, with base board heat. And there was a set of coils inside the 'boiler part' for domestic hot water.

...........pizza oven ;D

Moonshine Still....    ;D

looking closer I can see the 3/8 copper for the house lines at the top. And at the base is the fuel oil pipe to the burner?
Can't figure out the 1 1/2 inch steel pipe with the valve attaching to the top. Expansion tank?

pF,

Looks like a broom to me.


klc

Looks like a meat smoker..............Brisket anyone?

In our old furnace at home in NJ we had an oil fired system that forced hot water through the radiators, two zones for a 13 room farmhouse.  At the top was a large tank, suspended from the ceiling.  It had a large tube at the top to hold air space so the water could expand as it increased in temperature.  Looks similar to what we had.  Would be easier to tell if we could see more of the plumbing, sorta like tracing out a schematic.  Expansion tank /  reservoir?

looks like a coal stoker to me, my dad has one in his basement, that opening coming out of the side at an angle would be where the coal feeds in from the auger at, the auger would be fed from the coal box.

Class E rig prototype

I think it is a Flux Capacitor but build before they were invented and it could not go anyplace because time had not been invented yet, either.
If time had been invented, it kind of looks like time forgot the room.
We have a boiler like the one on right, just larger. Ands a fine JS it is.

Nah, that looks like far more than $20 worth of FETs and a handful of junkbox parts, or whatever the official 'QIX description was (it's been years but we still rib him about it).  ;)

My guess would be a coal fired boiler for steam heat/hot water. The large copper being the main feed to radiators and the other two copper lines being the fill and hot water out. Door on bottom for ash clean out. Looks like a plugged pipe on the side could've been a return for hot water heat before it was converted to steam. At least it makes sense in my head, which means nothing in the real world of course. 

For as rough as everything else looks, the copper looks recent, and the expansion tank on the oil furnace carcass looks new in comparison.

 You guys are a riot!  :)  I especially liked the ones referring to class E prototype.

Anyway, it was a coal fired boiler as a side-saddle to the oil fired burner.  I gotta say that this guy's wife has to be given some sort of medal for being patient and putting up with a lot of hair-brained schemes that hubby came up with.  Not shown was a Archimedes screw that was used to feed the coal burner.  I was totally blown away.  I got a fairly good discount on the purchase price of the house for replacing the whole mess with a new furnace.  Just going down there gave me the creeps - straight out of a Frankenstein horror show.

I got a good laugh out of your “theories” thanks for brightening up my day – I needed it.

Meat smoker – now that was one I didn’t expect but given a coat of flat black paint and put it in the back yard - - sure I could see one in the back yard.

Al

Too bad you confirmed what is was so soon. Funny stuff indeed !

Yep. Old coal job. Looks like a Fitzgibbons or Nash boiler from the 50's. If there are firetubes in it, they are probably made from inconel which scraps out around 5.50 a pound these days. Changed out a 5000lb Fitz commercial boiler years ago. It took us 3 days, 4 tanks of oxy, and one large tank of acetylene to chop it up. Had to cut out the inconel firetubes in the heat exchanger with a beefy plasma cutter as the torches wouldn't touch them. We took that 700lb+ pile to a dozen scrap yards for quotes and settled for $6.60/lb. That was aside from the 3500lbs of heavy steel from the rest of the boiler. The rest of it was all bricks and other crap. :D  

I'll have to find out from dad what the one he has in the basement is, looks a lot like that one. He put it in about 10-11 years ago, I was fascinated by it (what 8 or 9 year old wouldn't be?). I always loved hearing it kick on, you could hear the coal auger running. Only thing dad really didn't like about it that much was getting it started, usually took him half an hour with some kindling and a propane torch to get a fire going in it. He only ran it a few years then he started running the outside wood boiler, now he uses the oil furnace most of the time. Since he did HVAC as a business, it seemed like our house was always a testbed for different experiments, we had a coal stoker, oil furnace, outside wood boiler, and a pair of heat pumps in that house.

Interesting basement Al!  I think you may have needed a bit more than that wee little broom to clean THAT up..
 ;D

Dad says his is an Axeman-Anderson.

hand-fired solid fuel boiler, what I was going to suggest. The previous owners must have preferred some backup in case the other fuel was out. The gauge on the rectangular upright -I have one of those. It is brass with a thin steel protective casing over the meter movement and scales. It is meant to be threaded into a pressure vessel and read temperature on the large hand and pressure on the small one. On the backside, the threaded 'plug' is coaxial, having the temperature sensing element protruding some 2" from the center of the plug and around it a gap to admit the pressure from the vessel. They don't make good stuff like that any more.

Looking at that picture again, that stoker was probably an Axeman-Anderson 130, here's a video of one in operation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--juG-gudxA

WOW!  You nailed it.  I'm impressed with the beast but no way I would've put that into operation.  It is IMPRESSIVE!   :o