Rolls-Royce Archives
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From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Failures and solutions for issues with pipe nipples, brazing, and lubrication systems.

Identifier  ExFiles\Box 27\1\  Scan038
Date  1st February 1929 guessed
  
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(3) Leaks at nipples. These were due to rusty nipples. We got rid of this by careful cleaning of the pipes in the plating department, followed by storage in a cupboard in "Oakite."

(4) Defective brazing. A-10117 and 12437 show the tapered hole in the nipples and banjos which we find helps us to make a good brazed joint.

(5) Banjo leaks. After brazing, the faces of some of these were rough and dirty. We now provide the pipe assemblies with hand facing cutters to clean these faces after finishing the pipe. No further trouble.

(6) Chafed pipes. We did not at first understand well enough the necessity of holding the pipes firmly or not at all in such places as the "front spring run", where there is relative movement of parts.

We machine the top plate of the front spring on the faces and edges and use very rigid forged clamps holding firmly on the top plate. Pipe clips are soldered to the brass pipe and bolted to these clamps, so that no chafing can occur. The pipe is outside the gaiter so that it cannot rub against rebound clips etc. We have in the past had pipes touching the rebound clips which chafed through in a few hundred miles.

The pipe run down the front spring must of course be on a level with the center of the top leaf.

(7) Our principal cause of failure at first was due to the fact that we did not fully realize that each drip plug is equivalent to an oil-can spout held tightly to an oil hole and giving a feed of only two or three drops of oil every 50 miles.

Thus it can never flush a whole system with numerous leakage points from a single filling hole like an Enots gun can do.

Especially if the oil hole is low down on the system, the oil will reach the first leakage point and then escape and go no further.

In such a case the "voids" in the oil system have to be filled up with "capillary rods" etc. and a drip plug used of sufficient dis-charge so that oil actually flows to the point of the system farthest from the drip plug every time the pump is pulled.

Fan lubrication A-11211 is a case in point.

Note that this will just discharge oil at the front of the spindle when the spindle is up in the top position.

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