I'm sure most of you know R.E. got his start with hit-and-miss gasoline engines built by his father's business, P.F. Olds & Sons.

I go to Olds shows, and to old farm equipment shows, and I see Rumely OilPull tractors and Olds gas engines out the wazoo but I did not know about this connection. No, I did not pay a buck fifteen for it.


http://cgi.ebay.com/RARE-1920s-RUMEL...d=p3286.c0.m14

 

I am familiar with the term hit-and-miss and suspect it is a nickanme given because of the sound those old engines made but not sure. Any insight on this?

 

A Buck fifteen? Check your glasses my friend. It sold for One hundred & fifteen bucks. Probably to a museum????

I also did not know that Olds had ties to keeping America fed from the farm. Even my Oldsmobile History of The First Seventy Five Years doesn't have this cool info.

 

I believe a hit and miss engine does not fire every cycle. The engine fires and the engine will go through 2 to 3 cycles before the engine will fire again. There is a local steam and gas show here and it is really neat when they are running. Have all sizes from less than 1hp to a 75hp monster that was at of an oilfield in pa. (one cyclinder over 600ci weighing over a ton with the flywheel) When it fires it sends a smoke ring about 12 inches across about 30 feet in the air.
Larry

 

hit and miss, it will fire only when demand calls for it. with no load the flywheel will spin for many revolutions before the centrifugal force is low enough on the flywheel to allow it to fire again. if the load is high, the flywheel will slow down much faster and make it hit every time. so with no load it will "miss fire" many times then hit. it is kind of like a set of points on the flywheel with a spring that the centrifugal force has to overcome. when it slows down it will make contact and fire. i am not good at explaining but this is the best i can do.

 

They use a governor that looks something like this:


It holds the intake valve open when the flywheel is spinning over a certain RPM. When it slows sufficiently the valve closes it allows the cylinder to fire.

 

yes! that is right. i was thinking of a small model engine i seen that had the point thing. but yes, i guess that it would have a hard time spinning freely without holding the valve open.

 

It's called a ****-and-ball governor. And that's also where the term "***** to the wall" came from. They used them on steam engines to control the throttle. When the ***** were at full extension they were "at the wall" so to speak.

 

Interesting. I believe industry has lost the nostalgia and innovation it had during the late 19th and early 20th century. There are numerous ideas from that era that are just now being developed because of our addiction to the internal combustion engine. The Sterling engine is an excellent example.

 

Uhhh, buck-fifteen, buck-fifty, buck-seventy-five all translate to one hundred and however many dollars. A US $100 bill can also be called a Ben (as in Ben Franklin), same as a twenty is often called a Jackson (for Andrew Jackson's portrait on the US $20 bill).

Someone refers to ten large, that's ten thousand dollars.

Sorry for confusion.

A group of Mennonites had two Olds engines set up at Southeastern Old Threshers' Reunion a few years back. One was running a squirrel cage blower, the other was running a double ice cream churn. There was a Rumely OilPull out tearing up a field with a 3-gang plow too.

Even that couldn't compete with a big Frick steam tractor that my Pontiac buddy and his wife are both qualified to operate. It will pull a 4-gang plow and when it gets down to business it will chuff a few times then start picking up speed while it busts up the ground. Sounds like a steam train engine, which it's a miniature version of.

 

 

I would add "C" note and "Cat eye" to this conversation.

"Shoot Luke, you're faded"

 

I remember being at a dumpy junk yard back in 1980 I was 16 years old and I noticed an aluminum intake and a holley carb for a Pontiac on the floor. I asked the guy how much and he said " a buck and a half" I looked at my friend, he looked at me, we started digging in our pockets for dimes and quarters and the guy laughed and said "A buck and a half means $150.00" We put our nickels and pennys back in our pockets.