Cubic Zirconia Steam Machine

Stolen Art No.5 Faceted Cubic Zirconia Steam Machine

The Art piece was stolen from Shurgard Maastricht Noord whilst in their safe area.
This machine is an oscillating cylinder steam engine also known as a “wobbler”.
The first patented oscillating engine was built by Joseph Maudslay in 1827 and they were
typically used for marine applications.
This one, however, is the worlds first running oscillating steam engine made entirely out
of Cubic zirconia and gold and silver.
Build time 130 hours.
264 facets
20 grams of 14ct gold
50 grams of silver.

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This machine is an oscillating cylinder steam engine also known as a “wobbler”.
The first patented oscillating engine was built by Joseph Maudslay in 1827 and they were
typically used for marine applications.
This one, however, is probably the worlds first running oscillating steam engine made entirely out
of Cubic zirconia and gold and silver.
Mine is just the vertical version.
Here is a video link of the machine running.

I start with raw Cubic Zirconia.
It comes in many colours and these were the ones I had on hand at the time.
The brass wobbler is one that I made to see if I could make such small steam machines run. That one ran, so I figured a CZ one would as well.

I use HXTAL resin to bond the various pieces.
It takes 5 days to harden, but is is immensely strong.
So strong, in fact, that it will break the parent material first before the glue releases.

CZ gets cut with a diamond saw. The blade has diamond particles impregnated in the edge . It spins very fast and is lubricated with a constant water through flow.
It is not sharp in the conventional sense so my hands are quite safe.

I like laminating CZ together and the faceting it. This was a piece if rough that I was going to cut into a mixed emerald cut. So I figured, what the hell, if I drill hole into it and it breaks, toughies. It didn't at all. I drilled a hole through it using a diamond core drill under water. The water, as with the diamond saw, is used for lubrication.
This picture is looking lengths ways.

You can see the vague outline of the cylinder running down the center of the green stripe.
The reason it is not more clear is because I have already polished it. The top hole is the inlet/outlet port and the bottom hole is half drilled and is where the pivot will be attached.

The yellow piece was first of four center posts I made. All the others broke.
CZ is quite hard but very brittle so the patience was strong in this one. The center pivot is fitted loosely in the laminated cylinder and the piston has also been turned on my lathe.
The pivot and piston are made out of 14 ct gold.

Here the pivot and piston are being checked. I have also made the small end of the piston, which is the part that will go into the crankshaft.

The top view. One can see the exhaust port in the green section near the top.
Both surfaces have been polished so they form the sliding valve of the wobbler.

Cutting the crankshaft wheel. I use an Imahashi gem cutting machine for all my faceting.

Fitting the rough crankshaft wheel to see where the bottom pin must be drilled.

All the CZ being roughed out. The pink will become the flywheel. The maroon piece is the flywheel shaft bearing. It's colour change material, maroon under incandescent lighting and yellow under fluorescent lights. Seriously cool material. The purple is the crankshaft wheel.

Which promptly broke. I made seven of these before I got one that worked well.
CZ is a very brittle material, and some colours are decidedly more brittle than others. So every time I would make a new one, I would choose a different colour.
Topaz blue is the most brittle colour, I found.

Cutting another one. First I cut a slice, then I drill a hole in it. Then I facet it parallel.
Then I use a threaded dop to hold the slice and I facet it round.
Luckily, they are tiny, so the waste of material was minimal.

I had to see if the thing would actually run before I started faceting all the individual components. So I stuck everything to a piece of glass and made some temporary silver tubing and connected it to my compressor. The cylinder has a upside down Iolite gemstone glued onto it temporarily just so the cylinder can keep pressure.
Classiest cylinder head in the world.

And run it did. And those are the hands of my ever faithful and patient wife helping me with my next crackpot project. Bless!
Now the concept that a machine made of CZ was feasible and could be made to run was proven to me, I could start faceting the pieces of CZ.

So then I proceeded with the crankshaft wheel, first drilling the holes with a diamond core drill. I decided to make the crank shaft wheel first, because drilling.
Most chance of breaking.

Smoothing out the holes before polishing the insides. One always has to work wet.
The white bowl contains water and I use wet or dry sand paper in increasingly fine grits to achieve the inside polish.

The standard method for faceting the wheel was used, namely, first facet one side, then use a transfer dop and facet the other side. The wheel is first glued to the one side with a two component epoxy. After hardening, it is faceted and polished.
The inside camfers were polished with felt buffs.

Here is the transfer dopping tool.
After the first side is completed, that side then has a dop glued to it as well.
Then, when the glue has hardened, both are removed from the transfer unit and heat is applied to the first dop. This causes the epoxy to release the first dop so that that side can then be cut and polished. I warm the dop quickly, using a Oxy-Propane gas flame. The glue gets hot so quick that there is almost no heat transfer.

Here is the fly wheel completed.
This picture is not over saturated.
It just looks this hot pink colour in incandescent light.
In LED and florescent light it looks much paler.

Here are all the cubic components finished faceting.
I laminated a piece of faceted orange CZ for the head of the cylinder
There are 260 facets all in all.

Here are all the components waiting for the base.
I faceted the cylinder head in a sort of opposed bar cut.

I made the base out of a colour change piece of CZ.
It goes red under incandescent light.
This machine sparkled very differently under different light, and because of CZ's high Refractive Index, it sparkled quite easily. This was a critical stage, because if anything was skew, and the holes did not align, the resin would not allow me to remove anything once hardened and the project would have to be scrapped.
So I was very careful.

Now was time to make the silver base stand.
So I melted some silver, cast a plate, rolled it to about 2.5 mm thick and sawed it to shape.
In this case I just use a hacksaw to cut it because I am lazy.

Once I had it shaped, I cut cast and rolled and bent some leg blanks.

Then I filed them to shape. Also, my stamps on the bottom.

And I soldered them to each corner.

I made some tubing for the inlet. This had to be made very accurately, because when you insert it into the CZ and if it is only a little bit skew, the CZ will crack.
And I know all about cracking.
Also, it had to be removable, so it had to fit quite accurately without glue.

Fitting the little motor onto the stand.
The nut in the picture is replaced by a gold cap.
The spring next to the nut I also made out of gold.
All in all there are 20 grams of gold in this motor. ( I think)

Once everything was adjusted, I took it all apart and polished the silver and gold components.
Here I made a big mistake. I resin glued the CZ base to the silver base.
I should have joined them mechanically, because subsequent polishing of the silver base proved to be very tricky with the CZ attached.
It was very neat, but I should have drilled some holes or set it in a silver surround instead.
You learn.

Making the display box.
Just a simple box made out of normal glass.

Piston side view.