An Engine for Every Engineer

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Another noteworthy feature of Class E, F, G, H and J engines built during 1880-1899 was the use of a water-lined smokebox. According to steam historian Jim Jake Templin of Texas, the water-lined smokebox was intended to make use of waste heat from combustion to help heat the water in the boiler. In reality, the short smokebox on a traction engine had insufficient surface area to contribute much heat to the water, the added expense in construction was hardly justified, and it gave scale and rust a place to collect. According to steam historian Thomas Stebritz, whose family owned a 13 HP Gaar-Scott Class H, “ … in a number of cases, the bolts burned off and the engine was no longer good because of the lack of a welder to fix it up.”

Other interesting engines built with coal- and wood-burning boilers were the Class R portable engines, a number of which were the biggest engines Gaar-Scott built. Most were constructed in a style similar to that of the standard portable or semi-portable engine produced by various manufacturers of farm steam engines. Others were built in a special undermounted style that permitted the engine to be detached and set up beside the boiler for stationary applications.  

  The parts book indicates Gaar-Scott stopped production of almost all of its side-geared engines in 1912, but later catalogs continued to list side-geared engines. Gaar-Scott probably offered the remaining inventory of such engines for sale after the style was discontinued. In 1913, Rumely Products, which had bought Gaar-Scott in December 1911, offered a beautiful yearly catalog depicting the Gaar-Scott and Advance lines side by side. This catalog still featured the newer rear-mounted engines and older side-mounted engines built by Gaar-Scott. By 1914, the yearly catalog depicted only the single- and double-cylinder rear-geared Gaar-Scott engines.

Single-cylinder, Return-flue Engines

Along with building its standard Class E engines, Gaar-Scott built engines with a return-flue boiler for burning straw. These engines (Table 2) were produced at least as early as 1885 in a “7-1/2-by-11-inch size only,” but, by 1891, a 16 HP model was added. The line was successful, and, by 1892, Gaar-Scott was offering separate classes of return-flue engines. Such engines were quite popular in the 1880s and 1890s, especially those designed to burn straw. Because of its double-pass design, a return-flue boiler was slightly more efficient than a standard locomotive-style boiler. Also, the standard Scotch Marine type (referred to by Gaar-Scott as the Cornish-style boiler, though it was not a true Cornish boiler in the strictest sense) had the added plus of being relatively simple and inexpensive to build, due to the lack of stay bolts that were used in a standard locomotive firebox. Gaar-Scott designated its simple, single-cylinder engines on Cornish boilers as Class K and its compound engines on Cornish boilers as Class L.

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