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Ron Mattson's Antique Engine Collectors My Article |
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Ron Mattson's Antique Engine Collectors My Article |
About a year ago, I became the owner of a small vertical gas engine. The engine had been outside for some time, but was in fairly good condition, or so I thought. The interesting part about this engine, and what drew my attention to it, was that it appeared to be a stationary engine that had been manufactured by a marine engine company. It has a cast base and a pulley cast into one of its flywheels, a brass water pump operated by a brass connecting rod from an eccentric on the crankshaft, and a Schebler carburetor. It is a two stroke engine with a check valve built into the cover that mounts the carburetor on the lower end of the crankcase. The governor consist of two L shaped arms on the inside of the flywheel that move another eccentric that controls, through an odd shaped rod, a throttle valve located in the transfer port on the opposite side of the engine from the carburetor. The ignition is low tension with an igniter that gets its snap from a rod that is operated by the same eccentric that operates the water pump.
 All these things are quite intriguing, but the icing on this engine is the brass cover on the cylinder head that has a six pointed star pattern drilled in it. The cover appears to have been machined from a solid piece of brass and is about a quarter of an inch thick. It is shaped like a jar lid and fits into a groove milled around the top of the head. It is held down by the primer cup that extends from the center of the head and it has a hole in it for a water pipe to exit through the decoration.
And decorative it is! The first thing I did was to polish the brass cover. Some Never-Dull and elbow grease exposed a piece that must have been the pride of the person who made it. ( The layout lines for the star can still be seen on the inside.)  The question: who did make it? No plate, in fact no casting numbers. None anywhere. No problem-a check in the "bible" (Wendel's American Gasoline Engines Since 1872) is sure to reveal something.
At this time I would like to compliment Crestline Publishing Co., and the people who bind their books. Maybe they can use this as a testimonial because after looking through the book at least ten thousand times, it is still together. Unfortunately, no clue to the origin of this engine was found. Disassembly of the engine revealed that water had done a thorough job of causing the cast iron piston to be firmly locked to the cast iron cylinder wall. And the reason the piston stopped moving in the first place was that the connecting rod was broken many years ago. Other then this, and a few missing parts, the engine seemed to be restoreable. The first order of business would be to replace the connecting rod. How? Get one cast. How? Make a pattern. How? Get a piece of wood and cut away everything that doesn't look like a connecting rod. This seemed to be within the realm of my ability. A few days later I had a wood connecting rod which I took to a local casting company, and within a week, I had rod that looked just like the wooden one I had made.  Now all I had to do was to get it machined. A trip to several small machine shops indicated that to me that I was in the wrong business. It would probably cost me only $400 to $600 to get the rod, that cost me $40 to cast, machined. I was told that the problem with doing a job like mine was that it would take one man about ten hours to set up a machine and do what was needed to be done to the casting, and that the cost of the machine and labor is not cheap. I can understand this, but the price was more then I wanted to pay for a part that, once installed ,will never be seen.
Fortunately a good friend came to the rescue. Pete, a fellow old engine person, has a home shop that includes a Bridgeport machine he had purchased a few years ago but had not yet set up to run. Pete and I discussed the problem I was having getting the connecting machined; his comment was; "wouldn't it be great to do it ourselves?" A night or two later, I got a call from Pete. He had the Bridgeport set up and was ready to go. Over the next few weeks we spent about 60 hours in front of the Bridgeport (the $600 was sounding better all the time). The end result was a beautiful solid bronze connecting rod that nobody will see.- Pete thinks that I should put a window in the side of the engine!  Things were progressing. The connecting rod was a major project, and with that done, the crankshaft welded and turned, most of the castings cleaned and sandblasted, it was time once again to try to identify the maker of the engine. During the cleaning process the only numbers found were a small 40F on the igniter boss and similar numbers on the main bearing housings, no casting numbers or other markings. Another visit to the "bible", this time with a more familiar eye, still turned up nothing.
About this time it crossed my mind that maybe I could trace the engine's lineage through its past. I contacted my niece's husband, from whom I had gotten the engine. He told me he purchased the engine about five years ago from a man who had since past away. He also said that the man had a son that worked with him, who was probably familiar with his father's engines. I called the son and he remembered the engine very well because of the star in the brass head cover. He thought the engine may have come from an auction that he and his father had attended at the Owl's Head Museum in Maine. He thought the engine might be an Ellsworth. Wow, a name! A call to Owl's Head and a conversation with the director indicated that, yes an Ellsworth or what was thought to be an Ellsworth was sold in an auction about ten years ago and that the engine had a broken connecting rod. Things were starting to add up.  In the meantime, cleaning revealed that the engine base and flywheels had been painted a shade of light blue and that the engine itself was dark blue or maybe black. A quick trip to the paint store and the engine, flywheels, base and other assorted parts are back to what I hope to be the original colors. The hardware, nuts, bolts and other unpainted parts were treated with cold bluing, a process used by gunsmiths. Reassembly is in time for the summer show season. Now maybe someone will know for sure what the engine is.
I talked with a lot of people this summer, many, very knowledgeable people. Unfortunately, by the end of summer I knew no more about what make my engine was than I did in the spring. One thing that stuck in my head was that very little is known about engines built in New England. A few companies, such as Abenaque Engine Works from Vermont are well documented, but obscure manufactures like Ellsworth and others are unknown, even to the people who now live in the towns that produced them. A scan of the index of American Gasoline Engines Since 1872 yielded a list of about 120 manufactures in the six New England states. This brings me to my current project. New England is a small geographical area and I thought it would be interesting if I could trace some, if not all, of these companies. Trips to several city libraries revealed some interesting facts. One, very few people know what a gas engine is and the important role they had in farming and industry, filling the gap between steam and electricity as a prime source of power. Also, there seems to be a larger number than the 120 noted above. For example, in the city of Providence, RI, my research has uncovered eleven companies at one time were involved in the manufacture of gas engines. If the list continues to grow at this rate, I think my project will be more then I originally anticipated. But the results may well be worth the effort.  What about the small vertical engine that started this story? Good news. Last week I visited the Rhode Island State Archives, and there in the New England Business Directory, published by Samson and Murdock in 1912, on page 1676 is an ad for the Ellsworth Foundry and Machine Works, Ellsworth. Maine, with a picture of one of the nicest small vertical engines I could have hoped to have seen. The idea of compiling a list of New England built engines occurred to me a few years ago while doing research on an old gas engine that I had then recently acquired. In talking to people, in the coarse of that research, I was amazed by how little information was available about locally manufactured engines. It seemed to me that it should be easy to compile a listing of New England engines, after all New England is a small geographic area--Boy was I wrong! For as small as New England is, it has a rich history of manufacturing. New England was the birth place of the industrial revolution in the United States and still continues to be a leader in the technology revolution of today. That manufacturing base is known to be one of the major factors that allowed the north to prevail in the civil war, and it follows that the birth of the internal combustion engine would occur here in New England. It also follows that the independent yankee craftsman would become intrigued with the potential of the internal combustion engine, and begin the development and manufacturing of them in what seems to be every nook and cranny of nineteenth century New England, and there in lies my problem. As more and more names of manufactures of engines are uncovered, (currently 238) the task of researching each one of them becomes more formidable, and I now know that it is a project that I will never finish. What I have tried to do is to put together a list, from sources published, unpublished, word of mouth, old magazine ads, and from talking to people in the hobby of collecting old gas engines. This list is only partial, it is the information that I have to date, tomorrow or the next day, another piece of information will turn up and be added, but for now this is it. I would like to thank all the people who have helped with this project. A special thanks to Herb Greene and Bill Wolf who have been more then just helpful with the loan of books and information, and whose encouragement and support keeps this project on-going. - Ron Mattson |
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