3012 S. Catherine Lansing, MI 48911
It started at the Portland, Indiana Show 1986. I saw an F. H.
Briggs engine made into a hit and miss. I liked it very much and I
thought now that I am retired maybe I could make something like it.
Later that day I bought two curved spoke fourteen inch pulleys.
They were new in a wooded crate. I used them for my
flywheels.
The next show I went to was in Ithica, Michigan. There I bought
an F. H. Briggs block with the head, piston, rod and crank,
everything else was gone. When the weather got cold I started to
work on it. I made the gas tank and base out of ? inch steel plate.
The brass gas cap came from an old water softener valve. I welded
up the ends of the crank and turned them down to ? inch and I put
in the keyways. The flywheels had a 1 1/8
inch bore so I made bushings with a flange on them. I cut the hubs
on one side of the flywheels flush and bolted the flanged bushing
on them. The bushings were made from old ? inch bore pulleys so
they had a keyway in them. I drilled and taped the ends of the
crank and used a large washer and cap screw to hold the flywheels
on. I have a 10 inch lathe so I had to find a way to put the
flywheels on without any machine work. I made my timing device out
of an old saber saw guage, a feeler guage and a piece of TV pipe.
The muffler I made from two old lawn mower hubcaps. I made the
carburetor from an old chunk of brass. The choke is a part of an
old flag pole cap. The governor is made from scrap steel and an old
muffler clamp. Spark is a model T coil and battery. The coil is
hidden inside of the base. The piston and rings were worn very bad.
It had very little compression. When I tried to start it I could
not get it to fire. I gave up on it and pulled it under my
workbench.
In the spring I went to an auction in Portland, Michigan and I
bought an F. H. Briggs engine that was in bad shape. The intake
valve dropped and went through the top of the piston. The rod
bearing was gone and the crank journal was shot. I welded the hole
in the piston and used the rod and crank from my other engine. Then
I put it all together and I had some compression.
It was a happy day the engine started. It did not run too good
at first. I had to do a lot of fine tuning. I had it running at a
show every weekend this year. This engine has drawn a lot of
attention and a lot of people have taken pictures of it. It has
been a lot of work, also a lot of fun. This was my first try at
something like this and I have already started on something
different for next year’s shows.
