MikeMandaville wrote:

In the nineteen-fifties, the Sentinel truck company sold several
hundred steam trucks to the government of Argentina. These trucks were
used for hauling coal. Of course, these trucks burned part of their
load to power their boilers. I see no reason why the Argentinian
solution should not work for me also.

Any comments?



Although equipped to run on roads, those Sentinel trucks were closer to
a locomotive than what we think of as a truck and building one would be
quite a project. You might do better by adapting the design of one of
the Serpollet steam cars built in France in the 1890's. They burned
coke, fed automatically to the rear-mounted boiler, from a hopper. The
boiler was a lightweight flash type made from a continuous length of
tubing formed into a coil and was invented by Leon Serpollet. This
machine could be operated by one man rather than the 2 man
driver/stoker crews required by the Sentinel and similar large trucks.
According to the story Serpollet switched to liquid fuel mainly because
he thought coke was too dirty for the luxury horseless carriages he was
building, but this would be less of a problem in a truck.

Mike