Having had a hankering to make a Watt-style governor but having failed to find any plans to my taste, I decided to design my own. Here it is, with 2D CAD plans produced with Draft-IT (and GIF images of the same) and my construction notes for download. The design is hand-cranked and lacking a valve lever because it was made as a retirement/60th birthday gift and I ran out of time to complete the valve lever (I wanted to assemble the governor before dimensioning the lever).
Inspiration for the design, and especially the proportions, came from Muncaster’s book and photographs I took of real governors.
All of the downloads are covered by the same Creative Commons licence as everything else on this blog. Feel free to adapt but I’d like to hear about modifications, ideas etc…
Downloads:
- Governor Plans (zipped: Draft-IT CAD, GIFs and MS Word construction notes)
- A large photograph of the completed governor
Nice piece of work and thank you for sharing with all of us steam lovers. I have been looking for a good govener to make and yours looks pretty good. I will most probably change the weights to threaded balls so I can adjust for lower or higher speeds. Thanks again.
Thanks for the comment Trevor. Threaded balls sounds like a good idea. I suspect there are quite a few practicalities to deal with if you actually want to use it for control.
Thanks for the great idea of the hand crank
model I would like to make one this size for
folks to check out at the shows we go to. I make small models but none big enough to hand crank.
Thank You
Roger