Building Stirling Engines
Without a Lathe

by Kjeld Hoejfeldt

Great book from England! From the backcover:

"Danish Accountant Kjeld Hoejfeld became fascinated with the concept of the Stirling, or hot air, engine and decided to learn more about them by building working models.

It is usually assumed that doing this is only possible with a good workshop containing, at the least, a lathe - something Kjeld did not have.

Undaunted, Kjeld started investigating means of building the models without any machine tools and, using considerable lateral thinking and ingenuity, built his first working engine; subsequently he followed this with increasingly sophisticated models which cover the major configurations and types of Stirling engine. Only hand tools and soldering equipment were used, and much of the material came from scrap, including many useful parts from old personal computers, videos, record players etc., as can be seen below, as well as used food cans, paperclips and the like.

In this book the author shows you how to build your first engine in detail and follows this up with slightly less detailed descriptions of how to build five other machines. There are no detail drawings, as the dimensions all depend on the material you can find, but the basic concepts and the construction methods are well covered and illustrated..."

It's a small book. Somewhat expensive. But really good. It proves that you can do amazing things with hand tools, a soldering iron, and scrap materials. I don't know about you, I get very tired of hearing people whine they can't do anything because they don't know where to find parts or don't have a $20,000 lathe. And then ask "Don't cha have a kit?" This proves you can do some very amazing things with the simplest of tools. (No, I don't think you'll be able to power your automobile with this. But you'll have fun, and you'll learn something.) Great ideas! Get a copy and start diving through dumpsters for components. 8-1/2 x 11-1/2 booklet 34 pages

No. 1568 ... $13.95