Handyman production line

Oh ... BTW I should have said "brand new unmachined castings" Sorts out who would take on such a project!
Colin

Colin,
I presume this was the same one at Sodbury for £1500 or near offer. It had a new con rod, piston, head, fuel tank, big end etc - none of which were machined.
I think I am correct in saying that the chap who is selling this did NOT have the patterns etc done himself. If I am correct, the chap who is funding the xrays/drawings/patterns has put a lot of time and money into it, in order to complete no less than two Petter Handyman engines from 2 less than half engines. The work he had done was first class. I think he had just about every part made except the crankcase and splash guard! Both will be like new engines when finished.
Regards
Chris Bedo Kent UK

'Twas the very same. One difference will be that any original Handyman has the works number cut into every component -- right down to the gib keys.
The patternmaker/fouindryman is in East Anglia. Excellent work. I'm pretty sure the Sodbury engine had an original fuel tank, but was missing the big brass butterfly filler & drain tap.
Colin

Hmm, this raises the inevitable question....
When does an engine cease to be a restoration and become a fake?
More than half replaced with new parts?
Fortunately most of the engines I play with are not of a value where it would be financially viable to do this. I can well imagine if I found a rare but incomplete beast, wanting to get it up and running, but surely a more ethical approach would be to stamp the replacement parts with the year of casting.
I'd be most interested to hear other's thoughts.
Regards, Arthur G

Arthur,
That arguement has raged in the Aviation and Automobile worlds for years. A wreck of an aircraft is found and rebuilt to flying order, when you look closely it is all basically new. The same goes for cars etc. On the FFestiniog Railway they are currently building (restoring) a locomotive that has not existed for years. How can they restore something that has not existed for years, easy. They are fitting into the locomotive the forward and reverse lever from the original plus a few other small items that they have. Its no longer a new engine but a restoration. Discuss that and see what you come up with :-))
Martin P

Another thought, fake is a strong word especially when the object has been manufactured as closely to the original as possible. Again for instance when steam was finally removed from the railways all Class A1 Peppercorn Locomotives were cut up. At the moment a group of people in Darlington are currently constructing from scratch a brand new Class A1 Locomotive using original drawings it is costing millions to build and has so far taken years but they are about to place an order for a boiler, this is going to be the first steam loco built for a long time and maybe the last because of cost, it is not a fake but a brand new steam loco. A fake is something that pretends to be something it isn't, in restoring an engine form a rusty hulk with many parts missing replacing those parts with made or equivilant items does not class it as a fake. Its only the idiot who passes it off who is the fake.
Martin P

I can remember many years ago several small cast iron engines turned up looking very rusty. It was suspected they had been cast a year earlier then buried in damp soil to make them look old. I cannot remember the details unfortunately.
-- Dave Croft Warrington England

I wouldn't call it fake. The original core of the engine is there -- the whole base casting & cylinder, with the original plate still intact. It's all in good order, & I've no idea why it got split apart.
That's akin to having original chassis or frame in the auto/moto world. Problem in those worlds is that anyone can build up a Ford T chassis, or substitute a mass-produced '50's motorcycle frame -- harder if it's a one-off or a very complex car.
I have an early Tangye gas engine. 1890/1900. I pulled it from a slurry pit where it had lived since the 1930's. The inlet valve & its chamber have been lost as they were broken off when the engine was dumped. I'm going to junk the engine as I haven't got the time or skill to build a new head, but if I did do that, I wouldn't call the engine fake -- not after the sweat & smells of retrieving it & knowing its exact provenance! Challenging restoration, yes. Fraudulent, no.
Colin

I see no problem with resurrecting ancient machinery using as many replacement parts as might be necessary. Even building complete replicas of lost or ultra-rare machines (viz Otto & Langen project mentioned in latest SEM) is fine. The trouble starts when some unscrupulous individual attempts to sell something on without revealing the true extent of the 'restoration'.
Don't know if it has happened in the SE world, but elsewhere it is not unknown for machines to 'breed' as a fairly complete example becomes a number of restoration projects, each with a few original parts!

Hiya me again,
now when i replace or get new parts made. i personally call it an overhauled engine,
i class the following terms as:
Restoration, a good clean and polish and tkae it all apart and put it back together with a repaint, so it looks like new
Overhaul, same as above but with a any new parts needed, ie rotten fuel tanks, although i do tend to repair them as they sometimes give the engines an history and makes them acturally look like they've done some work,
perhaps im jus strangem thanks, Martyn
PS fred dibnah restored/overhauled his engine from the reversing lever, so whats his engine? a FAKE; i think not!!!

All, it seems the word fake is a very emotive one. :-)
I notice how you've focused on it rather than the question. I do think it would be a little more authentic to mark replacement parts in some way to indicate that they are modern replacements.
Otherwise in 100 years, the then engine enthusiasts will have no idea what is and isn't original. I remember the word pastiche being used by someone in this context in the past.
I've not got any strong feelings on it, but if I were in the market for an engine which was reasonably intact or one where only the reversing lever was original, I know which one I'd buy. Echoing Martin, a piece of kit is only a fake if is sold or represented as something it isn't. So if replacement parts were dated or marked in some recognised way, then everyone would know what they were looking at.
Just my thoughts.
Regards, Arthur G

I do agree with the general sentiment here. When rebuilding an engine from scrap, it would be a very honest thing to do to date stamp them, but it would need to be done in such a way as to be unambiguous "10th August 2001" not "10/8/01" if you see what I mean. I can see that it would be easy to hoodwink the unwary by the manufacture of enough bits to (say) get a single base casting into running order, especially with engines as they are quite simple devices, if lumpy. But inadvertently? Restoration of an engine might easily require a few castings to be made and machined, valves to be replaced, perhaps a flywheel with a cracked spoke recast.
51% of new bits by number or mass? Very tricky judgement call. Anyway, in a hundred years it will not matter much as the information of the circumstances of the restoration will have been long forgotten. It is impossible to get information on some engines built in the 1950's, let alone 100 years ago!
A friend of mine makes a very comfortable living making medieval coin replicas and especially die sets for striking coins. He is a very skilled man and his work is indistinguishable from the original to my reasonably practiced eye. He is also the very paragon of honesty and works frequently for the British Museum and the Bank of England. He goes to great lengths to ensure that all his work is incapable of being passed off as the real thing and he told me once that all the coins that he sells (and it must amount to tens of thousands in a year) bear the invented name "Grunal", a moneyer than never existed. I grinned at him and said that in a hundred years there *would* have been a moneyer called Grunal - and look at all the pewter fakes he turned out! His honest consternation was a pleasure to see.
Anyway, to return to the point, it has been truly said that "That which man has made may be made again" and the reconstruction of four early Otto engines is a perfect case in point. If it was me, I'd be trying to do it as well as I could, making the replicas as close to the originals as possible. However, I'd also include a few design features of my own - nothing obvious - but things that would not matter in themselves, but would cumulatively speak loudly to some future purchaser that these were made a century later than the original.
Regards,
Kim Siddorn,

OK, have rechecked my pix. Handyman serial is #20932, distributor Kennan & Sons, Dublin. At least u know which engine to watch for!
I also see that the governor frame/bob weights were there, along with the crank. The engine main castings are original, so I'd be happy with it. A new head, piston, con rod, big end, vaporiser & governor arm were the main components in the kit, 'tho minor fittings were also missing.
Now ... if there had only been a simple oiler (or a wheel nut for a car) & the rest had been made to fit, I'd feel differently.
Colin

hello colin ,
you say the name on the plate is kennen , becauase i rekon it might be keenan .
my granda has a winnowing machine & a corn grinder made by keenan , bot used to be belt driven off a fairbanks morse Z which we also had .
could you email me the picture please ?
thanks - john d Eire
p.s - how did the engine get back to england along its life ?

John --
I have a clear conscience for a change -- name is definitely Kennan on the plate.
I first met the engine on the jumble stall. No knowledge of it other than as an impersonal, slightly sad, pile of parts awaiting a white knight. History unknown to me. Will mail on pic of plate & one of general pile.
Colin

John -- please contact me offline to get pix. Your email address blows up on me.
Colin @ "gwbert at email.com" - substitute @

i have dug up a bit a bit of history on that firm kennan & sons , make the ''engine'' a bit more interesting !
Kennan's House, the building now occupied by the Contemporary Music Centre, is the former premises of Kennan's Engineering Works. The firm of Kennan and Sons was one of Dublin's oldest, established in the 1790s and flourishing until the late 1980s as a manufacturer of metal products of all kinds from tools and implements to cast-iron manhole covers, street lamps and even large structures such as bridges and pylons.
see this link is of a old picture of where they operated in temple bar .
hope this is of interest to people ,
regards - john d
Éire
p.s - thanks for the pics colin