Yesterday I had a nice drive upto Scarborough to fetch back a nice Bamford tulip top that I purchased of ebay recently. The engine has being stored for over 10 years and has suffered from been exposed to damp at some point.
By time we got home last night it was too late to do anything with the engine other than wheel it into the garage. However I had the afternoon off work and following a general clean up (The engine and trolley where covered in years of oil, dust and bird sh*t) and the addition of some fresh petrol, to my supirse it fired up first time and ran for a minute, before stopping. A quick check revealed that the non return valve was blocked. I quickly corrected this and am happy to say that she then ran for a good hour and a half.
The Woman I bought the Bamford off had a number of other engines 2 Lister D types, 1 A type, a Petter A1, a Wolseley WD8, Staurt Turner P5,
1.5hp Petter acorn top, Lister H1 pump and a Bamford Corn Mill, but these were all in much worse condition that the Bamford (most of the mags were covered in white aluminium oxide powder, the petter M was siezed and the Petter A1 and Wolseley were thick rust). After a good check over we made what we considered to be a reasonable offer (the same amount that we paid for the tulip top) for the rest of the stuff. However the woman had apparently had an expert value the engines and believed that they were worth at least 3 times what we were offering.Needless to say we prompthly loaded the Bamford up and left without any of the others.
A picture of the bamford can be found at