3821 Hope Street Klamath Falls, Oregon 97603-7556
This story starts out, as most do, about an engine and a stroke
of pure luck. About a year ago, I was working a graveyard shift at
the hardboard plant of a local mill. My son was working for the
Public Works Department in the town of Merrill, Oregon. He and his
boss had brought up a load of scrap iron to the local junk dealer
in Klamath Falls. They were unloading it when our son’s
‘eagle eye’ spotted a scruffy looking little engine sitting
on a pile of scrap metal that was due to be crushed as soon as the
crew came back from lunch. So, our son trotted up to the office and
asked the lady inside about the engine and she said, ‘Load it
up and we’ll see how much you owe on it.’ He got it for a
more than fair price, and made a bee-line for our house.
I had only been asleep for four hours when Paula, my wife, came
in and shook me awake and told me that our son was outside and had
an engine for me. SAY WHAT! Well, at the mention of the word
‘engine’ I went flat line to wide awake in four seconds
flat, a new world’s record for me!
My wife could see that there was no chance of slowing me down,
but she did suggest that it would be nice if I tried putting some
clothes on first, before I went out the front door! Oops!
Our son said he thought it was a Fairbanks, but on closer
inspection, I said I believe it’s a Cushman. Well, after using
a rag and rubbing off years of crud, the nameplate read Sears Farm
Master, and it still had almost all of the paint on it! We got it
off the truck and onto a dolly and rolled it back to the shop. I
paid our son what it cost and after that I couldn’t go back to
sleep. Gee, I don’t know why!
When I started to work on that little engine I took the head off
and soaked it in kerosene because both valves were stuck. When I
opened the drain plug for the sump, what came out looked more like
black strap molasses than motor oil. After getting the valves
unstuck and cleaning out the sump and water hopper, which was full
of chaff and wheat seeds, I got it back together. I put in fresh
oil, fuel and a new plug, gave it a good crank, once, twice, three
times, nix! In my excitement to see it run I had forgotten to check
the spark and found that the breaker surfaces were filthy. Cleaning
those off and calming down a little, I tried it again. This time it
fired on the first try and stayed running.
I have no notion as to what the original paint color was, so I
gave it a coat of Massey-Harris red and gave the truck and flywheel
surfaces two coats of Dupont Dulux black. It is minus a decal but
you can’t be a winner everyday. However, I wish to thank our
son, my wife and my friends at Branch 21 of EDGE&TA for their
words of encouragement (especially from Dan Sullivan) to get up the
courage to write this article.
