9565 Highway 63, Emmett, Kansas 66422
Because I wanted to find out how long a 92 Maytag gas engine
would run on 50 gallons of gas and three gallons of oil, I put a
float from a six cylinder carburetor in a short deep tank under a
Maytag engine, and plumbed in a 55 gallon barrel. A mixture of 50
gallons of gasoline and three gallons of Walmart 50-to-1
two-cycle oil was poured into the barrel.
I started the 92 Maytag engine on Friday, November 15, at 9:00
a.m. It ran until Sunday, November 17, at 11:00 a.m., 50 hours,
when it fouled the sparkplug and died. The engine was quickly
restarted after a new sparkplug was inserted.
At that point, I decided the fuel was too rich, and cut it back
about 40% by adjusting the carburetor. The first two days, the
engine was burning about 41/2 gallons of fuel
a day; but after it was adjusted down 40%, it burned about
31/2 gallons a day. The adjustment also cut
the smoke down considerably. On Tuesday, November 19, I drained out
five gallons of gas-oil mixture from the barrel, and replaced it
with five gallons of straight gas to dilute the fuel a little more.
The engine ran 125 hours more, then started missing and died.
Luckily, I was there, put in another new plug and restarted it. The
third spark plug ran 97 hours, then I put in another new one so it
would be sure to run all the gas out of the barrel without stopping
again.
Two weeks from when I started the engine, the barrel went dry at
9:25 p.m. on November 29. I stopped the engine with its tank full
of fuel, as it was full when I started it. It had run 348 hours and
25 minutes. If the fuel had been properly adjusted the first few
days, it would have run another 24 hours, I feel sure, and the
first sparkplug would have lasted longer. It was firing at about
140 times a minute, which would mean it fired about three million
times during this experiment.
The next day, I took the block off the engine to check the
exhaust ports. One port was partly carboned up, but the rest were
clean. The ignition points showed no wear. The connecting rod
showed no wear due to less oil. From now on, I am going to mix the
fuel for my Maytags at 20-to-1 rather than 16-to-1.
I’ve been told a number of times that a Maytag engine
wouldn’t keep running if you ever got it started. I think this
Maytag engine disproved that theory.
Along with this engine, I have nearly 400 Maytag engines now.
About 350 will run and have run one tank of fuel. I also have about
30 or so other small air cooled engines, including a Briggs Q,
which runs real good. And I have about 40 flywheel engines-these I
haven’t worked on yet, but will sometime in the future.
I built a Maytag tractor with six two-cylinder Maytag engines in
1987-it was featured in January 1988 GEM.
