25/07/2026
I spent a long time trying to resurrect 90-year old paper plans for the “William C. Daldy Owners Manual” - but really? Some of them are like fine art. This one was created from two poorly shot photographs of copies of the originals. Originally copies of the original drawings would have been literally blue prints - like this one. They were produced by a cyanotype process which produced an essentially photographic contact print from the original drawings. An original blueprint can be as crisp and clear as the original drawings, making them ideal to reproduce the precision of something as complex as - in this case - a steam powered steering system. I had a scan of a photograph of a photocopy of, probably, another photocopy of an original plan. Light and technology being what it is, the plan had lost some of the crisp relief of the original fine lines, but there are a lot of tools available in the digital domain to correct those issues, invert the drawing and present it as it would have appeared in 1935 in the Renfrew workshops of Lobnitz and Co, in Scotland. This is the “Donkin Patent Steering Engine” which was combined with the “Reid Patent Twisting Piston Engine” - neither of which were actually patented. That made research important. Knowing how something operates really helps if ever it needs repair, and so there’s a detailed description of the operation of this engine, now literally unique, in the Daldy Owners Manual.
