Yup.... I've been pretty quite on the board of late, but hopefully for good reason. I set a self imposed deadline for the little Victorian project which, as of tomorrow morning, is upon me. Those who've built engines of any complexity know that quite often getting them to run is almost as long a process as the actual build.
Well.... it wasn't quite that bad here, but the little dickens fought me pretty hard before it was saddle broken. I can now disassemble and reassemble it almost with eyes closed and do it in mere moments. It's had 3 sets of rings, 2 carbs plus one experimental version which I'll revisit at a later date, the valves finally seated properly after the 7th lapping session and then the little ignition module gave up the ghost while I was hunting the mixture setting. That story will be the subject of further review as the saga finally runs its full course.
The good news is that I've gotten the infernal thing running again, after building up a coil/condenser and breaker points ignition system that one could almost weld with. Once I got it running for this the second time, I've spent a few days letting it limber up. The governor that will make it miss is yet to be activated because the engine needed to loosen up before I could determine what the low end of the RPM spectrum will be.
Bottom line.... she's running again and doing so with much more power and dependability. It's shaken things around enough to point the weak points out, so that I could make the needed fixes, so hopefully it will be on its best behavior for the engine show, this weekend.
Thanks to John and Bill, my local mentors, for their patient ears and sage advice, without which this little motor would have been far harder to get going.
Now that I'm not under a rushing deadline, I'll try to get back in gear around here and maybe even contribute something from time to time.
Steve
