Markfield Beam Engine and Museum - the governor
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Markfield Beam Engine and Museum - the governor by Chris Allen as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
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Markfield Beam Engine and Museum - the governor
Image: © Chris Allen Taken: 24 Jul 2011
The engine is an 8 column Woolf compound rotative beam pumping engine built in 1886 by Wood Bros of Sowerby Bridge. This shows the governor. It is a centre weighted or Porter type governor driven by a shaft and gearing from the crankshaft. It operates a throttle valve upstream of the high pressure valve chest. On a pumping engine like this that runs at constant load its real purpose is to act as an overspeed governor rather than a speed regulator. The speed is adjusted to the load by manually adjusting the high pressure cut-off. If load was to be lost the engine would speed up and the governor would hopefully act to stop a dangerous increase in speed.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
51.58186
Longitude
-0.061503