I said elsewhere that I'd bought a Johnson Iron Horse off ePay & got another one in the deal. I started looking at them yesterday. I straitened the wire frame from one & discovered that it was, in fact, made from thick wall tube. Never know that.
Turning to the engine, I found it had no spark. The points were coated with oxide as expected & a quick rub with 800 grit W&D fixed that. When I refitted them, I noticed that the fixed point wasn't as fixed as God had intended & wobbled up and down in it's hole. A quick bit of riveting saw to the looseness & now it had a spark.
No go - and no compression. Cast iron (& barrel) head off - broke the bloody gasket despite all my care! damn - and as expected the exhaust valve was stuck open. Some scraping around the stem through the port fixed that in short order. Brass bristle brush in the drill cleaned off the old gasket & s**te & carbon, but an examination of my diminishing stack of Halite gasket stuff produced nothing suitable.
So I explored an idea & made three from kitchen foil a la BSA Gold Star - a bit more compression wouldn't do the performance any harm! - fitted them without breaking them (not easy) & now it had loads of compression.
A whiff of Gypsy's Breath into the port & away it went - brrm!
The carb was already off & sitting under the desk lamp to cure the Epoxy with which I'd fixed the broken flange.
This one had no fan cover, so I invented one out of very thin fibreglass salvaged years ago from a trailer tent. It bent round readily enough & was riveted to small right angle brackets made from redundant PC computer case steel sheet. A sheet of the GRP was cut to the shape of the one off the other engine & riveted to the brackets. It'll be finished with car body filler, rubbed down & sprayed up.
Should be finished tomorrow. It is destined to go to Kent for battery charging as our little B&S garden tractor (which is really useful there) always flattens it's battery by the end of the day.
The other Ferrous Nag is a later Johnson of Canada original & it has an aluminium fuel tank, cylinder barrel & head. Noticeably lighter as you'd expect.
I do respect these generally ignored little units, I've never yet found one that doesn't go after minor work nor one that doesn't start on the button & produce a charge.
Regards,
Kim Siddorn