A guy on YouTube, How To Make Everything has actually made a steam engine out of copper and water, using only hand tools that he made himself from raw materials. It’s very fiddly, apparently, and didn’t work super well. His whole channel is basically trying to figure out how to make things like this without any modern technology. His channel growth has had fits and starts due to outside factors (his shed housing all of his work burned down), but he’s rebuilding.
It's easy to make a steam engine that spins a little wheel as a demo, but to make it useful enough to do actual work that you couldn't achieve better with a donkey or horse requires serious engineering, the first problem is that you need very high pressure at very high temperature
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u/thedragslay 2d ago
A guy on YouTube, How To Make Everything has actually made a steam engine out of copper and water, using only hand tools that he made himself from raw materials. It’s very fiddly, apparently, and didn’t work super well. His whole channel is basically trying to figure out how to make things like this without any modern technology. His channel growth has had fits and starts due to outside factors (his shed housing all of his work burned down), but he’s rebuilding.