I took a couple of weeks off while my wife was recovering from knee replacement surgery, but I did get to spend some time out in the shop! I built three small electric solenoid engines from base castings purchased from Nick Rowland. He had the base castings left over from a flame licker engine he no longer sells, and I decided to make something out of them. The larger solenoid engine is from a Hired Man air cooled casting kit.
These four engines are already sold, and I have some happy customers who thought they would not receive them until at least Cabin Fever. Now it's on to some projects for myself, including a Parsell and Weed horizontal model hit and miss engine and a twin cylinder Tiny Power steam engine. These should take the rest of the winter, but if things go well, I also plan to build a second model Domestic vertical water-cooled engine.
And, I finally found time to figure out a solution to getting this "littlebrother" running right after having it for a year. It would run good until i would take it to a show for sale, and then it would always act up- at least that's how it seemed. It turned out the original points setup was working intermittently. They worked consistently when turning the crank by hand, but at running speeds, they weren't always making contact. I finally made a bracket to hold a set of auto points, a new cam to operate them, and finally have it running properly. I find myself with way to many model hit and miss engines at the moment, and these small engines do well on ebay, as they are fairly cheap to ship. Now it's just a matter of waiting for a huge blizzard to sweep across the country, leaving all us collectors unable to get anywhere to add to their collections- this is when they all turn to ebay, thus a great time to sell!
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