Some oil wells here in Texas still use these engines to power the pumps. Fairbanks Morris has been a house hold word in the oil business for almost 100 years. thanks for sharing.
I remember pulling a brand new engine out of the old F-M plant in Beloit, WI a few years ago. I’ll never forget the multitude of employees outside watching while beaming with pride.
Ajax engines like this were capable of running with rings so loose that you could see light when looking in the crankcase when the plug was removed. They are remarkable for the ability to help children sleep.
The old engines were indeed fascinating. I had one for a while. Brother-in-law wondered if it was getting fire, so he told me to crank it. When he stoppec yelping he said yes. When used go to Oil Creek State Park which had an excellent presentation the early petroleum. I ncluded was Drake's Well, the first production oil well in the US.
I had a 4hp Cushman once.. Used a coil and battery.. Coil much like a Model T coil....Magnetos are simple as dirt to work on.. I wish I knew how many I have repaired in the last probably fifty years... I think I still have a magneto lurking around in the shop for one of those old engines ..Cheers from Louisiana...Mike
Here is a tip on starting the larger hit&miss style engines: hold the intake valve down untill you get some speed up on the flywheels, then release it and the engine starts. The faster cranking speed also makes the magneto have a hotter spark, thus helping the firing up of the engine. The radiator on the FMZ is actually a condenser. As the engine gets hot, the water steams and goes up in to the condenser where the cool air changes the steam to water and it falls back down in the water hopper. A lot of these late engines had fans to speed up the process. After Fairbanks quit making these engines, a company called Arrow machinery made them for a long time.
Arrow still makes heavy engines for oilfield service - they also they use them as prime movers for AC - there also used to generate voltage on pipe lines instead of using anodes so they don't eat out - Those Z engines and arrow engines run about 5 yrs between ring and bearing change out if there running above 500 RPMs - many z engines are still on jack pumps today or small bore wells - The cooling we called thermal siphon - they have large cast iron radiators and used oil for cooling instead of water
Zc118 and 208 engines were usef all over this county on pumpjacks.had one on the family farm from 1963 till the 90's. Also used Witte and Ajax engines. The ajax was on a farm 1/8 mile away with a 6 inch x10 foot exhaust pipe. Loved to hear that beast bark at night. Back then i could ride my bike back the service roads and watch the engines run. This was mid to late 70's rural central Ohio.
I have a very similar Fairbanks Morse “Z” 3 hp. The belly tank is typically for a cheaper fuel after its warmed up. (Kerosene, coal oil) It is a suction system, no pump. The small tank on the carburetor is for warm up fuel (gasoline). You can also hold down the intake to make them easier to get cranked up. Neat engines!!! 👍🏻👍🏻
Enjoyed this video. It reminded me of a late friend who had a Bean Sprayer engine similar to the open water jacket engine you have. His engine came from his parents farm. He rebuilt the engine, then extend the frame of a WheelHorse lawn tractor that he had and mounted the engine of that tractor to power it. To ease starting he added a switch to change the spark advance. Occasionally he would throw this switch while the engine was running and it would throw a foot long flame out the muffler. He suffered from MS so used this tractor to get around Edwardsville, IL. He also fabricated chains for the drive wheels and pulled his daughter on a saucer sled through the snow.
I am really impressed with how smooth that old engine runs. Those old engines were very simple and ran forever. Something that can't be said for today's engines except for the extremely large engines.
There are few things neater than a shop run off of a line shaft. I've seen awesome ones in Albany MN and Rollag MN. It's something few have seen and most people are in awe when you explain it to them.
Mr. Rucker: if you don't know Shopdogsam, he's on RU-vid and has HUNDREDS of that type of engine. If you need parts, expertise, etc., I would talk to him.
Shopdogsam. After working on Hit and Miss type engines for a lifetime. Hands down the number one old school engine ICON on RU-vid. Anyone that buys some ones collection of100 engines that had been sitting outside for decades, brings them home, takes them apart so that no two pieces are left together and every part is worked with a file puts it back together and they run just factory fresh. That is the man you want to learn from.
You had me at “Ice Cream” :) It’s so lovely that you take care of preserving and restoring these items! How wonderful to have a line shaft in the shop - even if steam is a few steps too far (for now...) I would really like to watch you design and put in the line shaft!
Keith, just a little FYI, when opening a LP gas tank, when you open the valve, you need to open it all the way, the valve is back seated, and if you don't gas will escape out around the stem.
Used to collect these engines myself until health issues got in the way. Fairbanks are very solid and reliable and parts are everywhere on eBay ect. Small engine mechanic and Shopdog Sam are good recommendations. Someone said something about not having your thumb around the crank, very good advice! If it kicks back when starting you will have at least a broken thumb. We used to hold the intake valves to spin them up, it lessens the chance of kickback. If it's at the wrong position on a kickback they can break your arm! Other thing I noticed, you didn't crank it too fast (the Z) but you always want a plug wire connected to something else with a magneto. If a mag produces spark and isn't connected to something the spark can spike and ruin the mag. Never do that on an impulse mag (like on the 118) because they wind up to give full spark at low RPM's for easier starting (that's the clicking you hear when cranking it). Nice engines, I agree, not steam, but still very neat.
Your tip about not causing the mag to spark when the plug wire is not connected is huge. That mistake would cause the “average” owner to have to buy a new $500.00(?) mag!
Cool stuff! I just wanted to let you know that there is in face a big difference between Hit n Miss engines and Throttle governed engines. People commonly confuse them and refer to throttle governed engines as hit miss engines but they are not. Throttle governed engines hit every time. Your may miss occasionally when its not under a load but it is not a hit miss engine. True hit miss engines have no throttle shaft in the carburetor and use a flyweight governor and a series of levers to hold open the exhaust valve when they get up to speed. This kills compression, spark, and no fuel is sucked in and they coast until they slow down enough where the governor weights come back in and it releases the exhaust pushrod and fires again. It's basically a very early way of governing the speed. Throttle governed engines, like most modern engines today, use a throttle shaft in the carburetor and a governor to regulate the speed of the engine. The reason your seems to miss is probably due to the governor being a bit slugish to react, but I bet if you put it under a load it with smooth right out. Again I'm not attacking you or anything, I just wanted to let you know that there is a difference between them. :) Either way they are very cool engines!
Where I grew up I was told that they didn’t run electricity there until the late ‘50s. Right where we put our trailer, there was an old house, built right around 1900, and people lived in it in the 1960s, and it never had power. We ran power up there in 1974.
I would say about 1/4 or maybe 1/3 of the oil wells up here in Southern Illinois are still ran with these types of engines, most (that I know of) are run on propane. Neat little engines to listen too while you're waiting on a deer to come by deer hunting!!
Hold the intake valve in while cranking. When you have made a couple of revolutions let the valve go. The hole in top of the air cleaner was for squirting gasoline in to get it started and keep it running until you got the casing head gas and the air damper adjusted. That is a gasoline carburetor that has a vacuum fuel pump in it. If you did not have a good casing gas supply from the well casing they would run the engines on drip gas. Drip gas was the condensate usually collected by running the natural gas going to the flare by simply running it thru a 55-gallon barrel so the heavier parts of the gas would condensate from the lighter gases. Drip gas would then be used for many purposes. During WWII when gasoline was rationed people would use drip in their automobiles. It was so dry, basically naptha, that you had to mix a little oil in with it to lubricate your upper cylinders. Drip had a very distinctive smell. The revenuers were always trying to catch drip gas sales or users as there was not road tax being collected on it. Wish you would have set the governor speed control spring down to the lowest idle speed and the sound of and the governor action would have been very special as it would get to do the on and off throttle that made the sound we used to hear in oil field country. That was caused by the well pumper just being too lazy to adjust the counterbalance weight so the weight of the lift pump downhole and the column of oil being lifted was equal. That rare 18" pulley would be great for mounting it on an old garden tractor and having a unique ride to pull a butt-buggy around events. A small diameter pulley would be great for the lower speed needed for a line shaft. Driving a line shaft to power your planer would really be old school as much as steam. Steam was great but it required a lot of time and gas engines just required giving them a crank. The 118ZC was splash oiled and the radiator where vapors rose up and were condensed back to liquid by the fan air being pushed thru the radiator meant you did not have to keep adding water all day.
They still run them here in Oklahoma in rural areas .We always called them Acme engines in the oilfield i got to work on a few ours are actually gas pressure started from well head pressure . They run for years unattended .
My grandparents had one of those the lighter green one but much bigger to pump water up to the 3 story tank house, it ran on natural gas from there oil well.
At the Illinois State Fair several years ago, in the area where they display old tractors and such, I saw a small pile of machinery with a flywheel. It was almost perfectly quiet. Every once in a while it would go PUTT!. The flywheel would go faster. I was fascinated. I still am. I'll own one some day. Love yours too, Keith.
Years ago, I joined northern Illinois Steam Power Club and central states Threshermens Reunion. It was there that I fell in love with hit and miss engines, especially with superior side shaft engines,
Keith this one hits home for me. We built our first of two homes in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1970. This area was homesteaded at the turn of the century. Early pictures are quite interesting, everyone carried a rifle or shotgun. The only source of fresh meat required a hunter’s eye. Our area has always required well or spring water. Today the wells are deeper. Early wells used jack pumps. Across the road a jack pump with an electric motor was in use for many years after we built our home. Sitting next to it is a Fairbanks Morse motor. It looks to be larger than the ones you have. I contacted the current owners who gave me the green light to take it. Upon closer inspection I found that the Wolsey Fire had melted components of the magneto. It just seems more than I have time to deal with. It’s still there today, evidence of our past. Thanks for the great videos, Randy
Funny how things happen... I was looking for a chunk of cast to complete a shaper restoration and stumbled across another shaper in the scrapyard. Now I have 2 restored shapers.
Great stuff, Keith. My obsession with old 'n' slow singles went in the direction of the Lister diesel from England. They were ubiquitous throughout the Commonwealth, and are still manufactured new in India to this day. I'd love to acquire a Witte diesel at some point, which seems to be as close to an American-made equivalent of the Lister as possible.
I LOVE these hit and miss engines! Every time I go to a steam show, or other antique shows, I make it a point to seek these things out & watch them working. They remind me of my neighbors Johnny Popper when I was a child, the sound they make while running.
keith i have watched a lot of your videos but i am a person that does not say to much or comment to often but my uncle has restored a lot of the hit and miss engines he might be able to help you out
Those engin3s remind me of the ones seen for sale along rural highways in India. They propel anything that needs motive power, and some of the strangest looking homebrew vehicles I've ever seen.
I enjoyed your video with the fairbanks running . I have a 1930 s international harvester 2 1/2 300 to 600 rpm just learning a little about it . It runs but quits after 30seconds . Anyway im a new subscriber will keep watching
when i was a kid up in the ventura county mountains.. the hit and miss engine had a failure and ran away.. going crazy fast. it ran our water well .. so mom took the head off and it became my play toy from age 3 to 9.. i have never seen another like it as it had intake and exhaust valves in the block as i could watch the piston move and the intake and exhaust valves open and close with the head off.. the other play toy on my carpet was a model twenty cat and a cat pull behind road grader .. it was the former county road grader.. with Pnumatic tires and spoked wheels. a family down the road has the road grader in their front yard as a decoration with a fence around it.. the twenty has been sitting with a bush growing around it since 1965.. baking in the hot sun and freezing nights for the past 55 years.. seized engine.. seized throw out bearing. missing parts that somebody took off it.
Keith we used to have them for pumping farm water and the old ronaldson tippets used to rust out the water jackets not as bad as it sounds but something to look at
My sister lives on a farm in Kansas, they have an oil well on the property and it has one of these engines running on it 24-7. I took video of it several years ago. I have always been interested in them and would love to get a small one to rebuild. Love to see the line shaft running off of one of them. Ice cream is good also. Enjoyed, thanks for sharing.
9:19 sure looks like that spark plug is loose and moving around. Fairbanks Morse built some monster engines as well, all slow reving long lasting stuff.
Arrowengine.com still makes a similar engine for the oil fields. Their Type C engine looks like your FM oilfield engine. There is a guy who post videos of oil wells in Kansas. Most have switched to electric motors but there are still a few running hit and miss engines off of well gas. I love that set up, instead of burning it off as a flare you get free energy. If the power grid and the internet goes down those old wells will still keep pumping.
Love those 118's i restored mine from a very rough one . they are smooth runners, the little 3hp doesn't have a fuel pump in it they used just the vacuum and a check valve down in the gas tank to help keep fuel flowing into the carb
My Dad had a Maytag single cylinder engine from my Grandma's washing machine that he restored. I also found a two cylinder engine that I found under a porch of a house in southern Indiana while I was in college. Dad restored the two cylinder engine. Both engines were true "hit or miss" air cooled engines with centrifugal switches on their magnetos. As I recall they were two-cycle engines and both engines had kick starters, which I think was common on washing machine engines. These engines would have been mounted on the washing machine frame below the actual machine so they were started by stomping down on the pedal. The single cylinder engine found use on my Grandparent's cider mill every Fall when I was very young. Before Dad passed and the engines went to new homes, he and I had a lot of fun just starting these things and listening to their putt-putt exhaust. I don't know how much torque they produced, but it wasn't possible to stop them using a rag on the flywheel. Thanks for reviving these memories.
I ran across an abandoned large stationary Hit and Miss engine in a field that was used for oil pumping. It had a crank mechanism that converted the rotation from a very large flywheel into a push-pull linkage to several well sites arranged around the engine like spokes on a wheel. Single cylinder. The diameter of the piston was 14 inches and the stroke was (estimated) 24 inches. Huge old engine.
Those were oil field "Power" units. Most used big wooden tanks to supply cooling water. The power operator would simply switch tanks when that water got hot. Us kids used to sneak out to those places and soak in the warm water tanks in the winter. Many power units close to small towns set up showers for townspeople to come out and shower back in the days before running water or having a hot water heater. Usually was a men's side and a women's side. One I knew about the power operator had his place to sleep between the canvas sides of the showers. It was always said he saw thru the holes in the canvas more than the husbands ever saw.... Some of those old power units topped 100 hp. I saw one that the crankshaft with 8' diameter wheels was mounted on one concrete pedestal and the cylinder assembly on another one. To start it the operator climbed up on the spokes to turn the wheels backward. When the unit would fire the engine would reverse rotation and run the correct way. That way one did not have to fight the compression over the center.
Thanks for the video! Great to see you enjoying your new acquisitions. People are commenting about the starter crank. I was wondering about what would happen when you grabbed the rotating clutch handle. Must have been a little exciting.
I visited a farm in Oregon, in 1972, that didn't have electricity. It wasn't like they didn't want it but there wasn't power to their place. They use kerosene lamps, wood stove, wood heaters. It was definitely going back in time.
I was in Texas a couple weeks ago attending the Canton Trade Days event. There is an ice cream shop on the Trade Days ground that makes their ice cream there with an engine just like that and it was driving two of those ice cream makers just like the ones you picked up.
Tubalcain - Mr. Pete 222 - Lyle Peterson just sold a couple hit-and-miss engines. Like Able Lock said below, he's probably the go-to guy for them. He's up in Indiana/Illinois area. Thanks for the video. Jon
I am always amazed at the things FM did. Little engines. Submarine engines. Locomotives. Scales. Coaling towers. Ash pits. And I’m sure I’m missing some of there product line.
Hit and miss engines are just cool. They sound like something's wrong when they are running fine and I know they have a reputation for being reliable. They don't always run smooth, but they always run which is a big plus if you happened to have to count on one.
Rookie error. When starting any stationary engine you must keep your thumb on top of the handle, not around it else if you get a kick back you could lose your thumb. Even the spring loading handles like yours can jam.
cool, I have been working on a restoring a couple of old Hit and Miss engines, Mine are not Fairbanks-Morse but work about the same There In fact I have use my home shop to make some parts for mine. They are fun
That is not a radiator. If you look there is no place to add water at the top. It is a condenser so that you would not need to add water. I always enjoy your videos. Thanks for posting your videos
My cousin had one hooked up to a water pump at the far end of the field. The crank was missing and typical farm fashion a home made crank was bolted to the side of the flywheel. I was maybe 10 or 11 and that thing kicked and tossed me about ten to fifteen feet. I thought my arm was broken. Lucky day for me. That thing would run for days or weeks at a time.
20 yrs ago the "Utah Antique Machinery Association" Used to have ~ 70 of those at their summer show. Especially , those 3 HP ones, as they were used a LOT for the Irrigation channels out here. Might be a resource there.
If the tank is good next check the foot valve on the end of the gas tube that go to the carb hook a wire and check for spark then it should run once you have spark a little gas in carb boil and your running. There’s gas engine magazine the has much info . I have had gas engine since the 1960 and now and steam traction engine . Thats the only reason I took machine classes back when line shafts were the way to keep my old iron running
One of my classmates in grad school grew up in rural Nebraska. He was born about 1965. He insisted that the water pump motor ran continuously for the entire 18 years he lived at home. I grew up in Michigan, in a city with a big GM factory, and could not imagine how an engine could do that. But these engines are NOT automobile engines. Both are varieties of internal combustion engines, but that is like saying an whale and a mouse are both mammals.
Looks great.... I was thinking the whole time about you powering those ice cream churns with those engines. That would be a good moneymaker for the museum.
I plan on building my new machine shop in the spring. I want to set up one section with my old line shaft driven machines run by maybe a hit and miss engine. I want it to look like the early machine shops of yesteryears. I have s 24 inch 1906 Schumacher and Boye lathe as well as post drills and line shaft driven grinders. It would be awesome to see one of those engines drive your metal planer. Congrats on the new iron.
