Baileycraft Stirling Engine

This amazing little Stirling Engine is from Bailey Craftsman Supply a company that sadly seems to have gone out of existence. I bought it for about $A200 including shipping from the USA. Robert Bailey could not have been more helpful. In our initial exchange of e-mail he must have spent at least an hour replying to my endless stream of questions. Over the course of the sale, and later we have exchanged quite a few messages about this engine and Stirling engines in general.

The package included the engine itself, the alcohol burner, two wicks, and a great book on Stirling engines. The instructions that come with the engine are very clear and easy to understand. The book is great, draws a lot of disparate knowledge on Stirling and other heat engines into one concise volume. The engine runs like a dream. I operate it on about 10ml of Isopropal (a very pure alcohol). The engine will chug away for about 25 minutes (at least) on this tiny amount of fuel. The engine is mechanically efficient and is very reliable and easy to start. Whilst it is not powerful at all at low revs, it can outrun a similar sized single piston steam engine running at 40psi at high revs. When running model steam engines, I hate to see them speed along at thousands of RPM with nothing to do. I have built a heavy spinning governor like mechanism which I drive from any engine I am mucking about with. This Stirling engine can turn it faster than all but one of my steam engines. (I'll put up pictures of them soon).

I work at a company heavily involved in mechanical engineering for vending machines, and most of the guys there are at a loss as to how the engine works.

The engine is very well built, with high quality, tight tolerance machining.