Another new addition to the clutter followed me home last night. As the title states, it's a hit-n-miss engine. Right at the moment though, it's only a "miss" engine, as the magneto is kaput. I'll tell the story of the acquisition at the end. Here are some beauty shots.
Some parts are from a different engine, as they have newer paint on them, but the vast majority of the engine appears to be original and unrestored.
The below photo is of the all-important serial number tag, which dates the engine to 1931.
You might have noticed in the above photo that there's a hole in the crankcase where the magneto usually resides. Well, the mag is ailing so I'll need to figure out what is wrong. Below is a photo of the offending piece.
I took a reading between the two slip rings shown above and got 1.5 ohms of resistance. Someone on YouTube said that it should be around 5 ohms, but I didn't know if 1.5 was "better" than 5 or if it was too low. I then started inspecting things and noticed that the three wires that got soldered to the slip ring were really, really close to touching the hole they passed through (below). I wondered if a wire was lightly touching the edge of the hole.
I took a pick and carefully bent the wires into the center of the hole, then measured continuity again and got 5.1 ohms of resistance. Houston, I think we found the problem. (Side note, that was one problem of many.)
Below is a photo of the wires after bending them. You can't really see much.
Here's a little better shot.
After finding that little issue, I decided to take some 4/0 steel wool and shine up the slip ring that was very dirty. It should work much better now.
Putting things back together, there's a washer/shim that goes on the shaft before the cap gets screwed on.
Also don't forget the carbon brush.
This next photo is of the other brush holder tower thingy. It is made of plastic and threads into the hole (obviously).
After getting the magneto back together, I installed it and tried to start the engine. I did manage to get a pop or two out of it but nothing more. I decided then to pull the head and see how the valves and seats looked.
They were dirty so I cleaned them and then lapped the valves to the seats.
The intake valve was marked INT, and interestingly, the valves were installed backwards in the head when I went to remove them.
Below are a few shots of the cylinder and piston. They look fairly decent, and most importantly, the cylinder doesn't have rust pitting as so many old engines seem to have.
After the head was back on the engine, the thing still didn't run. The next thing to look at is the fuel line check valve. Yep, it was dirty and had crud in it. The needle and seat were also worse for wear. I chucked up the needle in a drill and smoothed the cone out as much as I could.
Here are the chunks of debris that came out of the check valve.
With everything back together, the engine seemed to pop a few more times than previously but still it didn't run. The check valve came apart yet again. This time there was a bigger chunk of garbage in it.
At that point I decided a screen was in order. I found a piece of wire mesh and bent it into shape, then wired it on the check valve.
At this point I was getting a good flow of gas to the mixer valve but still not much in the way of popping from the engine. I then decided to again see how much voltage the magneto was producing. Only about 1 volt AC, and it should be more like 3 or 6 volts.
A minor boo-boo occurred though when I was cranking the flywheel to generate the magneto voltage. I had removed the intake valve spring and pushed the valve in slightly so there wouldn't be any compression while turning the engine over, same as I had done the first time I checked voltage early on. This time the intake valve got sucked into the engine and the piston slammed against it and slightly bent the valve. Grrr. That was dumb. I should have at least put the cotter pin back into the end of the valve before spinning the engine over.
I mounted the valve into an old lathe chuck and proceeded to hammer the valve straight again. This process worked quite well and I got the thing nearly perfectly straight again. I then chucked up the valve in my mini lathe and cut the seat concentric with the stem. I then lapped the valve to the head once more. The below photo is after the lathe work but before lapping. Good as new.
At this point, with the engine/magneto combo still not working right, I removed the magnet from the magneto and took it to a friend's house so he could recharge the magnet. While there, he gave me two other magnets to also try on my magneto. I got home with the three magnets and tried my newly charged magnet. It didn't work so I installed one of the spare magnets. Wonder of wonders, the engine fired up and ran. If you know about hit and miss engines, when they cycle to draw in a charge of air/fuel, it is supposed to be one cycle of drawing in the mixture, then immediately firing once to speed up the engine, and then it coasts several revolutions until the next cycle of drawing in fuel. My engine was cycling two or three times before the thing would fire. That isn't right so I thought that maybe the check valve was letting gas leak down so the engine would then need to make several "draw" cycles before the gas got back to the mixer.
Out came the check valve once more and this time I sharpened a drill bit to a point that mimicked the shape of the check valve needle poppet and dressed up the check valve seat. That seemed to do the trick and the check valve was finally working right. The engine now ran well and did the normal one-cycle draw-in of gas, then fired immediately.
Below is a 20 minute video that shows a little of what I did to get this engine going.
So now for the back story. For reasons I don't quite understand, I've been wanting a John Deere Model E 1-1/2 or 3 hp hit and miss engine for a while now. I had a lead on one but it sold before I could get to see it. The guy got $900 for it (I wouldn't have wanted to pay more than $600), and I think it was in similar unrestored shape to this one except the engine ran. Minor detail....
A few days ago I was at the Kittitas Valley Threshing Bee and Tractor Show in Ellensburg, Washington, with some friends. We'd taken a 1922 Dain hay press over to bail the straw from the threshing process that they were demonstrating. While at the show I got to talking to a guy who was a friend of one of my friends there. This guy had a JD E 1-1/2 hp engine he wanted to sell for $400, but the magneto wasn't working. I said I'd buy it.
One little fly in the ointment was that he lived in Hermiston, Oregon. That's a 2-1/4 hour drive southeast of Ellensburg, the opposite direction from home, and a 5+ hour drive back home from Hermiston. My wife was game to take the trip so at 2:15 we left Ellensburg and headed southeast to Hermiston. We got the engine loaded up in the truck and were home by 10:45 pm, which wasn't really all that bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment