Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 12:25:48 :
In Reply to: Hit & Miss engine...OT posted by Steve in NJ on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 19:29:39 :
When I was a kid, I always heard them called "one-lungers" by my Oregon kin, I guess because they wheeze like an old guy with a bad lung. Before my time, my grandpa had one that ran a drag saw (I have the spare spark coil off of it), and a neighbor had one that pumped water. The Yakima county fair and the Spokane county fair both have a pretty large set-up of one-lungers running all sorts of equipment. They'll run on just about anything from kerosene to natural gas. I once knew a guy who had about a dozen of them he'd recently bought for next to nothing out of an old oil field in Montana. They'd been out in the dry country and had only run on natural gas, straight from the well-heads, so they were all in pristine condition. He had the big one, an "Atlas", in his shop. It was so big that when he tried to run it on compressed air, as soon as it turned over, it sucked all the air right out of his compressor. It was a monster. It looked like a steam engine out of a mill, which is probably not a coincidence, since I'm sure the early one-lungers were designed by steam-engine builders.
Unrestored ones are actually pretty common and pretty cheap. Restoring one is the hard part. No NOS parts are available. If you like puttering in the machine shop, it's a worthy project. People even make their own piston rings. Stealable parts like magnetos and governors are as scarce as hen's teeth. Even restored ones, when they're for sale (which is usually when the old guy dies and his old buddies don't need any more) aren't very expensive. Nobody recoups what it cost to restore them. I think they're pretty cool, and if one fell in my lap, I'd take it, but I have enough projects already, including two smallish steam engines that "ran when parked", and boilers to go with them, that I haven't done a thing with yet.
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