Farmall Cub

At the shows I see the hit-and-miss engines, but never have owned nor operated one of them. I remember a feed mill with an engine out back. The mill had been converted to electric motors and I never saw the engine in use. But a couple of people do remember it being the power source for the mill. They say that a bulb of some sort on the engine was heated with a blowtorch and then someone would stand on the spoke of the flywheel to get it rotating. Anyone have an idea about the engine? Gasoline? Kerosene? Diesel? I suspect that it was kerosene, spark ignited, and 15 to 20 hp. But others are much more knowledgeable than am I. Give me your best guess.

I imagine it would be one of the "hot bulb" engines that were very popular in Europe. The would run on virtually any fuel. Check them out on wikipedia or just google hot bulb engines for a lot of information.

Sorry you brought back memories of my first job rebuilding machines.

When i first started rebuilding machines we had a similiar designed machine come in from a company who made nails in canada these were cold forming headers. They had big flywheels and connecting rods and were the piston would be it had a slide. It would draw in the round stock and on the so called compression stroke it would cold form a nail and head at the saametime. These reminded me of the old hit-miss engines. We scraped in new bronze plate bearings and i did the lube system. Before they had castiron for bearing ways with a drip oil lube system. The later ones had steel plates for beaing ways. We rebuilt them all.