On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:46:14 -0500, Jeff Wisnia
wrote:

Harry Everhart wrote:
In article ,
"Joseph Meehan" wrote:

Are you sure that was a gasoline engine they were talking about. Diesel
and kerosene are very close. Gasoline is different.

At best, I would expect that it would do the engine no good, if it
worked. I am sure it would really screw up a modern automotive gasoline
engine.

It might have been a better idea to have bought a diesel engine
generator tot start with.


Joe -
This was done in the 30s - 40s - 50s to save money. Yeah - the gasoline
engine did not run the greatest on a mixture of kerosene/gasoline but it
ran well enough to do the work. Times were tough and money was tight.
You made do with whatever worked. We ran a Ford Cub Tractor on the
mixture for 10 years - by the way - it was a very used tractor to start
with :-)



Yes I've seen small single cylinder engines used for irrigation pumps
and similar which had dual compartment fuel tanks. A large section for
kero and a small one for gasoline. There was a valve you could turn to
switch from one to the other, and you had to remember to switch it back
to gas for a while before stopping it so there was gas, not kero in the
carb bowl for the next start.

Kero run farm tractors were quite common, again with gasoline used for
starting.

I strongly doubt that today's sophisticated engines and fuel systems
could take that kind of treatment without serious modifications.

Back during WWII I remember reading an article in either Popular
Mechinics or Mechanix Illustrated showing how to add No.2 fuel oil
burning capability to an ordinary car. IIRC in addition to needing two
fuel tanks, they had you wrap a bunch of copper tubing around the
exhaust manifold to deliver the fuel oil to the carb heated up so it
would "work better".

Gas was rationed during that war. I remember my dad had an "A" sticker
on his windshield which was the lowest priority and entitled him to buy
only 3 or 4 gallons of gasoline a week. (Actually it was RUBBER that was
the big problem, the US had pretty good supplies of oil, but at the time
the Japanese declared war we were getting over 95% of our rubber from
Japan, and synthetics weren't really on line yet. So, rationing gas
saved rubber.)




We also had a gasoline clothes washer on the back porch that ran on the
same mixture. It was a two cylinder opposed engine - no carb - just a
reeded dial that mixed the air and fuel. You twisted it open for more
air - twisted it closed to stop it. The washe has a pedal similar to a
motorcycle to start it. That was a sight seeing my 200 pound Mom
"dancing" up and down on that starter pedal every Monday morning.
Harry

I've still got a spark plug from one of those beasts in my box of "fun
junk" It comes apart for cleaning. The name "Maytag" is printed on the
other side of the insulator, you can just see the ending "g" in Maytag
to the left of the "CHAM" in the right hand photo:

http://home.comcast.net/~jwisnia18/temp/plug.jpg

Thanks for the mammaries,

Jeff
You'll probably like this link as well.. Look half way down the page
for the washing machine..
http://galthistory.org/gasengine/2003.htm
Chuck