3 Edna Terrace New Hartford, New York 13413
So, the doctor says that we are most certainly expecting, and we
figured we had better take a vacation this summer before my wife
got too big.
I always wanted to see the southwest, and we have friends in
Phoenix, Arizona, so we decided to go. Now, I admit that Arizona in
July is not the best plan in the world, but under the circumstances
we didn’t have many options.
The reader, by this time in the story, will no doubt be
wondering, ‘Just what does all this have to do with Old Iron
anyway?’ Well, a couple of our friends do a bit of four
wheeling, and they stumbled across an old gold mine out in the
middle of the desert one day. (Aha!!) Now anyone who has known me
any length of time at all will have seen hit-and-miss engines on
occasion, and can ID one on sight. So when my friend told me there
was an old engine at this mine, I of course was very interested. So
one of the plans was an excursion out to this site.
It was about 111 degrees outside, and we rolled down these very
dry gulches and canyons for several hours. We eventually had to
walk because the trail ran out, but at the end of the road was a
building which was evidently a processing plant. It was mostly
gutted, but the rafters contained quite a bit of line shafting, and
some of the larger pieces of processing equipment were still about.
There was a large, much abused, multi-cylinder generating plant, as
well as the remains of a four-cylinder power unit that had been
used extensively for target practice. But the gizmo of interest was
a large one-cylinder engine. It had no name tags, but several
features made me believe it was a Fairbanks-Morse, or maybe an
Ingersoll-Rand. It was belted up to a large two-stage
Ingersoll-Rand Imperial Type 10 compressor which sat behind it. At
first, I couldn’t fathom what such a large compressor setup
could be doing at such a small plant out in the middle of the
desert like that, but it dawned on me that it provided air for the
jackhammers used to dig the mine shafts up on the hill.
The engine was complete, except for the belt pulley and magneto.
The mag was a high tension setup firing two spark plugs deeply
recessed in the head. The drive coupling to the mag was similar to
the type used on early cars and tractors. It had a large pre-heater
around the carb to help burn low-grade fuels, and fittings for
air-starting which had seen better days. The six foot-eight, spoked
flywheels are probably the clue to its maker. I didn’t have the
foresight to bring a ruler for bore and stroke measurements, but it
looked to be around 20-30 HP, and all of five tons. It had a
mechanical oiler on the back, disk crank, atmospheric powered
intake, and rather conventional exhaust valve gear to an
‘L’ head mounted valve. The governor was flywheel mounted,
with throttle linkage to a butterfly valve near the carb.
Whoever dragged that back in there must have really wanted to do
it in a bad way. It seems that there was a bit of a gold rush in
Arizona in the teens and twenties, and the plant was last used in
the fifties.
The drive back was just as hot and scenic as the drive there,
and we got back just in time to miss the gully-washing flash
floods. The rest of the trip was also very nice but, except for the
mine, it was not very Old Iron oriented. I did see a 2 HP Sparta
Economy in a store window in Sedona, Arizona, but alas! It was not
for sale. It would have made a nice souvenir.
