Anyone know of cool stirling engine kits?

[Kin]

Hey, just thought I might put that out there. It's be nice to put together a stirling engine from scratch, but honestly I think I wouldnt have the time or capabilities for such precision.

I'm curious if anyone has seen a cool stirling engine kit that lets you put one together from parts. Most people here are into mechanics and energy, so I think there might be some response. I've seen one for $50 but it was largely mediocre parts, honestly, and a more long lasting metal one might be neater.

anyway,
I'll see if I get any response.




*Edit: With respect to my bad spelling, I'd like to talk about Stirling engines, not sterling (silver) engines, though the former are cooler than gold.

 

[Miles]

Have a look here:
http://www.stirlingengine.co.uk/index.asp
http://www.ministeam.com/acatalog/Bohm_Stirling_Engines_and_Kits.html

 

[Kin]

Those are beautiful.

And,

very very expensive (at least the particularly sweet $500 dollars ones). Perhaps I'll end up finding a cruder kit made of a bunch of laser cut pieces.

 

[Miles]

A more basic kit:
http://www.forest-classics.co.uk/novice_model.htm

 

[John in CR]

Those Boehm's are works of art. I've got a little Beta Stirling more along the lines of that Forest Classics quality that's meant for either fire as the heat source or sticking the hot end in a solar dish, but it wasn't a kit. My daughter and I got a built from scratch solar LTD Stirling to power briefly for a science project, but we had some friction somewhere that we never could find to eliminate and get working well. I haven't seen any kits, but the extremely low temp LTD Stirlings, such as those that will run off the heat from your hand are the most impressive, and there are a range of models to fit any budget on Ebay. There is a kit for a coffee cup Stirling that pretty cool.

Thanks for the post. I was into hot air engines before getting into ebikes, and there's a lot more selection in LTD's to buy for reasonable prices, so I want to pick up a couple of cousins for my little Beta. Sadly the Boehm Alphas are still out of my price range for desktop toys.

Now that we find out that Sunpower, who's been sitting on very advanced free piston engine designs and doing nothing with it except secure Obama giveaway money for some solar panel crap that can't compete, Bigmoose should be allowed to freely share his knowledge. Bigmoose I'm sure you're popping in, I've been waiting for Sunpower to do something for years in the form of a useful solar dish stirling, and now that I find out they've pissed a loan guarantee of $1.2 billion related to PV through one of Obama's giveaways, the very least they can do now is share their stirling technology with the world so someone can do something productive with it. Why didn't they just get the cash and build $1B worth of solar dish stirlings since they had access to the money? So what if prices are in the toilet right now, that can't last forever, but going forward with the scale they always dreamed of would have created real manufacturing jobs. Plus at the end of it, assuming a $2/W cost which should have been easy with 9 digit economies of scale, they'd have 600 megawatts of solar dish stirlings, ie hard assets of real value. I thought those guys were believers in that tech, yet they've now helped set back alternative energy in the states by at least a decade. Maybe natural gas was always the only answer if peak oil has really been reached, but it would have been nice to actually start on something that didn't involve burning a hydrocarbon. Sorry for the hijack, but I'm livid about this, and on the subject of stirlings we should be talking about useful engines if $500 toys are on topic.

 

[Kin]

No, that was perfectly on topic. I think the fascination with stirling engines goes deep into our ideas about energy and energy usage/generation. Thanks. Wish I had more to say, besides the immediate - what do you mean by sunpower having free piston engine designs?

I've handled in person a few years ago one of the engines that run off your hand. It was awesome!
Seems like you recommend looking through ebay for stirling engines prebuilt or kit.

 

[John in CR]

No, that was perfectly on topic. I think the fascination with stirling engines goes deep into our ideas about energy and energy usage/generation. Thanks. Wish I had more to say, besides the immediate - what do you mean by sunpower having free piston engine designs?

I've handled in person a few years ago one of the engines that run off your hand. It was awesome!
Seems like you recommend looking through ebay for stirling engines prebuilt or kit.

http://www.sunpower.com/library/index.php . Until sometime very recent their main page was some PV related crap, maybe not crap but they were always free piston stirling engine guys before the most recent couple of years. We're talking about the most advanced stuff on the planet, eg The kind of thing you attach some rapidly radioactive decaying material as your heat source for a 24/7 1kw engine with built in linear alternator, so with a single moving part supported by a gas spring you have 50hz AC with zero maintenance for at least 20 years. Needless to say free piston stirlings have a special place in my interests due to their functional simplicity. They're high tech in materials and design, but in function what could be more elegant and simple than put heat in one end and via 1 moving part get useful electricity out of the other end with one of the highest efficiencies of any engine ever built. This should be shared with the world, especially after the company somehow pissed away a $1.2B government loan guarantee. Give me a 9 digit loan guarantee, and I'll create a bunch of real manufacturing jobs along with useful and needed products. Shame on them. I want to see the books to see what was actually pissed away.

Regarding Ebay, your post gave me the idea to go check, and there's more available than ever. I'm leaning toward 3, a cheap LTD that the kids can touch and feel, one of the polished looking models for over $100 (one of which is in kit form), and that $18 Japanese free piston engine.

 

[bigmoose]

John $1.2B is a lot of money!! Where did you read that huge amount went to one contractor, I don't think it is factual. Perhaps an entire DOE program over 5 years with many contractors... but I don't think that much went to one contractor, could be wrong...

Some home made Stirlings, some solar:
http://www.solarheatengines.com/

Another Stirling engine manufacturer Infinia with their solar concept: (note article 5 years old)
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/infinia_plans_s.php

Is this the bankruptcy you were talking about? If so, there are a myriad of companies listed: ( Solyndra and Solar Energy Systems...)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576601500630947750.html

Or is this the article with the $1.2B loan guarantee:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/09/30/d-day-for-green-energy-loan-guarantees-as-another-solar-firm-files-for-bankruptcy/
NOTE the SunPower company in that link IS DIFFERENT from the Sunpower company you referenced... just FYI.

All these "exotic" Solar companies are being hammered down the drain by the glut of low cost Chinese silicon solar cells. That is what killed Evergreen a few months ago, and it is rippling through the industry. Contrary to popular opinion businesses must make a profit to stay in business and grow...

 

[John in CR]

It's a loan guarantee from the DOE to build a 250 megawatt solar station using PV, so not a grant. Things are apparently still in process, so maybe not another Solyndra, at least not yet, but $5-6/watt is absurd. If they come out with the most efficient PV panel, great, but for earth based solar what really matters is cost per watt, with efficiency way down the list.

I did some more digging and Sunpower may not be in the trouble I heard. They supposedly got $1.4 investment from Total. Of course that stuff could be BS as well. Things that don't smell good include government involvement, the fact that their main webpage is back to the topic of Stirling engines and coolers, and the CEO recently resigned. It's late 2011, and they have had the best engine design for a long time, so there should already be a plant cranking out solar dish Stirlings, but there is no factory or any solid plans to build one AFAIK.

There's definitely something strange going on, maybe with the Sunpower name used as a front or something, but I'm sure that Sunpower.com had PV stuff on the front page in recent months, and now that it's back to free piston stirlings on the main page, the only item News Release on the page is dated Aug 31 about a move to a new facility with the statement at the bottom about it being a private company. Something smells very wrong. There were news releases before, and why the need to mention that it's a private company. I've poked in to check on Sunpower for years, just waiting to become a customer or a distributor.

 

[Kin]

http://www.sunpower.com/library/index.php . Until sometime very recent their main page was some PV related crap, maybe not crap but they were always free piston stirling engine guys before the most recent couple of years. We're talking about the most advanced stuff on the planet, eg The kind of thing you attach some rapidly radioactive decaying material as your heat source for a 24/7 1kw engine with built in linear alternator, so with a single moving part supported by a gas spring you have 50hz AC with zero maintenance for at least 20 years. Needless to say free piston stirlings have a special place in my interests due to their functional simplicity. They're high tech in materials and design, but in function what could be more elegant and simple than put heat in one end and via 1 moving part get useful electricity out of the other end with one of the highest efficiencies of any engine ever built. This should be shared with the world, especially after the company somehow pissed away a $1.2B government loan guarantee. Give me a 9 digit loan guarantee, and I'll create a bunch of real manufacturing jobs along with useful and needed products. Shame on them. I want to see the books to see what was actually pissed away.

Regarding Ebay, your post gave me the idea to go check, and there's more available than ever. I'm leaning toward 3, a cheap LTD that the kids can touch and feel, one of the polished looking models for over $100 (one of which is in kit form), and that $18 Japanese free piston engine.

Ah! So they were the super group I heard about getting 25% efficiency (as compared to a solar panel covering same area) using mirror concentrated on stirling engines? [At a lower cost than PV]. Wait, actually, reading the PDF it doesnt look like that- so it must be some other company that I remember (and I think they were using regular mechanical stirling engines). What's more is bigmoose suggests there are two sunpower companies.

I was also going to complain (I mean ask) about links for the stirling engines you mentioned on ebay. But, it wasn't too hard to find some stuff with a link.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cheapest-Free-Piston-Stirling-Engine-Kit-Japan-/310350020149?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item48424d7e35#ht_7903wt_1226
[Japanese free piston]

I saw saw some $40 imitation [in the sense one of them tries to look like the $500 dollar ones] quality kits from china that may have still had some decent quality in them.

 

[John in CR]

There's SES and Infinia, which I believe both use multi-piston engines for their solar dishes, and I think for at least a while SES held the record efficiency. To me though the Sunpower engines were always superior. The free piston stirlings have intrigued me to no end.

I tried making one using parts from speakers in both the engine and linear generator, but I never did get it to work due to a combination of too much dampening in the spring and not being able to tune the frequency to the same resonant frequency. My thought process was that here's something already cheap and enjoying the economies of scale in mass production, so use some of those parts to build engines of a few watts. Then put an army of them as the roof of a house. When the sun gets hot enough, then start them operating in unison with a quick 50hz pulse with adjacent engines running directly out of phase, so any sound or mechanical vibrations cancel each other out.

Regarding there being 2 companies named Sunpower, that may be true, but at the very least the Stirling engine Sunpower leased it's domain name to the other Sunpower, and that lease has expired. Hopefully that's the full extent of the relationship, but I have my doubts because Sunpower's in's with NASA and the DOE through previous credible work would have been extremely valuable in helping secure that $1.2B loan guarantee for SunPowerCorp. Multiple coincidences always raise red flags for me. Hopefully my nose is wrong this time.

A $1 billion solar dish stirling factory including the first few years of labor and materials costs in that number would have been a lot cooler than a PV factory that can't compete with China. You can't have a natural gas burner make electricity at night or when it's cloudy with PV, but you can with a Stirling.

Re the Ebay stuff, I thought it was much better for your own search there instead of me linking a few engines.

 

[spinningmagnets]

If you like Googling, but sometimes don't know a good search term to start with...and you also like reverse engineering off of well-funded and seriously engineered designs from the past. Heres an on-going list I've been generating of the companies that have made Stirlings. Corrections, additions, and death threats appreciated.

Companies involved in home-scale micro-Stirling Cogenerated Heat & Power (CHP)
are Infinia, Rinnai, ENATECH, MTS, Bosch-Thermotechnik, Microgen

Water-pump BSR (Bomin Solar research) 10-foot diameter LTD Gamma
100W Saitama University, vertical 2-cyl Alpha
100W SFI Solar dish, mini-SES copy (Solar Space Frame Industrial)
100W SCM-81 SGE-Ecoboy (Suction Gas Engine) Beta
200W Philips MP1002CA (kerosene powered/air fan-cooled portable generator)
300W ST-05G (0.5-HP Gamma machinist copy of ST-5)
300W Saitama University, LTD Gamma
800W Genoa Stirling, inverted twin Gamma
800W Whispergen CHP 4-square cascading Gammas
1-kW SGE vertical coaxial 1-cyl Alpha
1-kW Baxi CHP
1-kW SPM CHP, 4 radial cascading Gammas (Stirling Power Module)
1-kW Saitama University, vertical Alpha
1-kW EG-1000 Sunpower, Beta
1-kW Norris Bomford small boat engine, vertical 3-cyl Beta's
1.8-kW Jim Dandy #6, 2-1/2 HP twin Gamma
3.0-kW Toshiba NS03T
3.0-kW GM GPU-3 (US Army Generator)
3.0-kW Joanneum, V2 Alpha
3.0-kW Disenco CHP
3.7-kW RHEP USAID, similar to ST-5, made with low tech
3.7-kW Lockwood, machinist copy of ST-5
3.7-kW ST-5, (Ohio, Stirling Technology 5-HP) Horizontal Beta
10-kW Solo Kleinmotoren V-160
10-kW SSPi Solar dish (Stirling Sun Power, international)
10-kW SBP Solar dish (Schlaich, Bergermann, und Partner)
25-kW SPDE, (MTI/Space Power Demonstration Engine)
25-kW Kockums 4-95 (submarine auxiliary generator)
25-kW USAB 4-95 (United Stirling AB)
25-kW SES 4-95 (Stirling Energy Systems)
25-kW STM 4-120 (Stirling Thermal Motors)
30-kW Joanneum, V2 Alpha
35-kW SD3-E CHP (Stirling Denmark)
55-kW STM-Power CHP
75-kW Kockums V4-275R (submarine main engine)
100-kW NASA, SPDE, SPRE, SP-100, HTSSE

Automobiles:
1969 GM Stir-Lec Opel Kadett, stirling series-hybrid
1972 Ford, Pinto V4X31
1974 Ford, Taunus V4X35
1975 Ford, Gran Torino V4X1
1979 AMC Spirit, P-40
1982 Lundström Porsche V2X36
1985 NASA MOD-II, Chevrolet Celebrity
1987 ASE (Automotive Stirling Engine, US Air Force-SPVP Stirling Powered Van Program, MTI-Mechanical Technology Incorporated)
2007 Sweden, Precer Stirling hybrid
2008 DEKA Revolt, Kamen stirling heater/generator, series plug-in hybrid

 

[spinningmagnets]

It would be difficult to turn a profit making and selling simple Stirling kits, because they are so easy to make from scratch.

You might consider going to the intructables site and using their search for "Soda can Stirling", and there are a dozen examples there with pics of the entire process. Here is one example:
http://www.instructables.com/id/An-easy-to-build-Stirling-Engine-fan/

edit: Heres a good project link http://stirlingbuilder.com/

click on the "how to make a paint-can stirling engine" link. It also involves a soup can and a small plastic cup, but the paint can is the displacer vessel. Lots of pics, and easy to make with very basic tools.

 

[Kin]

Re the Ebay stuff, I thought it was much better for your own search there instead of me linking a few engines.

Though you didn't really rag on me, to clarify, I definitively understand that sentiment. I didn't mean for it to be a http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Stirling+engine+kit moment, but rather I figured (successfully, I guess) that this thread would offer slightly more than that.

 

[John in CR]

Re the Ebay stuff, I thought it was much better for your own search there instead of me linking a few engines.

Though you didn't really rag on me, to clarify, I definitively understand that sentiment. I didn't mean for it to be a http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Stirling+engine+kit moment, but rather I figured (successfully, I guess) that this thread would offer slightly more than that.

I didn't think my ebay search result would come thru via a link in my post was all. I figured you'd want to see the whole list yourself. I later noticed that one of the nicer looking LTD was available in kit form, which would be cool to see all the inner workings first hand.

 

[Harold in CR]

My Dad was a collector of old Stationary Hit & Miss gas engines. Also collected Steam parts and models. ALSO had a hot air fan. It would sit on a table and blow air across you or a bed or wherever you needed to move air. It had a small tin bunsen burner type flame, under the fan, inside the base. You lit it, and after a few seconds, might have to flip the blade just a hair to get it to go. These were made for Hospitals, for the most part. Others DID have candle power, but, as the candle burned, the flame was further from the hot cylinder. I still have a copy of the original sales brochure. The original paperwork went to the new owner when the fan was sold.

Has about a 12" fan with 4 blades, if I remember correctly.

He also had a 3 X 4 Ryder-Errickson hot air water pump. You didn't get much power to run the pump.

There is an article, somewhere on the 'net, showing a guy running a 2KW generator with a Sterling that he built. Wasn't all that big, either. Don't know if I bookmarked that or not. Have to look.

Being in the wood business, sort of, I could run one 24-7 just using the Sun and scrap pieces of wood. 8) 8)

 

[John in CR]

I hope you still have that Stirling motor fan. Those are da bomb!

 

[Kin]

Sounds like the fan was sold. I have noticed some propane fan reproductions on ebay. Apparently they run for 500 hours on 1kg of propane.

 

[John in CR]

Yeah, the was definitely at least one Stirling engine fan as a consumer product, and there are new models available now. You just set them on a wood stove and the fan starts turning which leads to much better heat distribution from the stove.

 

[Harold in CR]

The widow sold nearly everything, until I threatened her Preacher Brother for not supplying the WILL. I KNOW there was one, but, even their damn Attorney lied. I hired an Attorney to find THEIR Attorney, and, after 3 weeks, I called him and he found nothing. I asked how hard it would be to find a FEMALE Attorney, in Haines City Fl, a small burg. ?? I never paid THAT Bastard, either. That's when I threatened to go to the Fl State Attorney general.

I was supposed to get the Class A motor Home and the 2 year old Dodge Pickup. Her PREACHER BROTHER stole that, and, offered to sell us back all our Dad's collection of stuff. I called the prick a damn thief in front of his whole congregation, and then, made the threat. Had a response in less than 2 days. We made 3 trips with pickup and trailer, and, only got half of what he had. They all but GAVE most of it away. Dumb f&cks.

PS: Sorry for that rant

 

[panurge]

Hi guys

I've been in love with stirling engines for longtime too, many heat sources in the sphere should have a stirling engine, for instance every fireplace built in a perimeter wall it's a perfect stirling place....a big differential between the two wall sides and a typical winter use when the T° gap is bigger....here in Tuscany most of the houses have a fireplace, also in the bigger towns....I've dreamed to make experiment by myself, cause I've full access to TIGs and CNC, but never had the time....

I have a small Stirling for stove's surfaces, it's really a beautiful device that show me how much the world and technologies are money dependent and crazy...from 2007 I've tried to obtain a wood stove with a small stirling coupled that is made by Hoval, a big european stoves manufacturer.....a friend of mine have this microCHP in his Swiss farm and works pretty fine......but after 2 years of requests and waits I've installed a better stove, but without Stirling

SunMachine has an interesting multi-pistons design also with a solar dish option......




Jules