I am glad to hear someone advocate the importance of hooking up. The White system would certainly show the folly of not doing so with its limited reserve. The point you make about temperature is interesting. A small squirt of high temp.steam is worth more than a big dollop of low temp.steam and in the Stanley system because of the limited superheater length, short cut off is the only way to achieve this. Short cut off with a sliding valve is always accompanied by a small port opening, poppet valves do not suffer from this limitation. So it would be very interesting to hear of any results from a poppet valved Stanley or White system-------but then I suspect that none of you fancy altering your expensive pieces of historic machinery----and who could blame you!!