Fairbanks Morse 20 HP Model N Hit and Miss Gas Engine

I feel lucky to have accidentally found this amazing video. It is important to me, because the US Army also shipped my grandfather to Tanana, Alaska the same year, 1908. Since he was an electrician, he may have wired this very engine up. No doubt he at least saw it in operation at Tanana. His actual assignment involved maintenance of the telegraph line. There were log cabins built every ten miles along the line. Two men and a dog team were assigned to each cabin. In the event of a signal interruption, the crews from two posts would hook their dogs to a sled and converge at the trouble spot to make repairs. I have a photo of him and his partner with their sled and dogs. The only white men they saw was in the Spring before the.Tanana River thawed and again in the Fall after it froze. The Army would send supplies up the frozen river on a sled pulled by a team of horses. He loved to talk about his Alaskan adventures. Thank you for this video!

Engine: inhales, inhales, INHALES, Inhales... POW

The old engines are important of history. Thanks for sharing!

I am sad to see that Alan James died. I have never heard of him until now but people like him is needed to keep history alive. That is what people like him does when restoring stuff like this! RIP! <3

I know the rating is only 20 Hp, but look at the size of that fly wheel! The torque must be immense!

So quiet! This engine is your legacy Alan, we thank you. It will outlive us all and still be running in 300 years!

There's always that one dude that has to stand next to big fast moving spinning things.

I love listening to those old engines breath between firing. Then it takes a shuttering breath and fires BANG!

Those pieces of engineering will outlast humanity for sure!

The engine had a 12" wide by 36" diameter belt pulley attached to the left flywheel. This pulley had a clutch in it's center which was held in the engaged position by using an over-center locking mechanism. The clutch had a 12" wheel for a handle that could spin so that the operator could grasp it while the engine and pulley were turning. You pulled out to engage and pressed it in to disengage. It took all my strength to yank the clutch into the locked position. There was a smaller belt pulley (4" wide by 18" diameter) attached to the right flywheel that was used to run the cooling water circulation pump. A 10" wide belt connected the engine pulley to the pump pulley. The engine cylinder had a water cooling jacket as part of the casting. Unlike the one in this video, our engine had a cast iron engine head. The top half of the head was water cooled from the jacket around the cylinder. The bottom half had a brass plug that we heated with a torch in preparation to start the engine. After the engine ran awhile, the bottom half of the engine head glowed a dull red, which could be seen in the dark. Starting the pump and engine took at least an hour on a good day. Once the torch was lighted and heating the engine head, we had to prime the main pump. To do this, we had a small manual pump with a lever that was pushed and pulled back and forth to operate it. As I recall, it had leather valves or valve seats inside to make a good seal. It was designed so that it pumped with both the in and out stroke. We used the manual pump to suck all the air out of the suction pipe and pump body of the main pump so that they were filled with water. The small pump was connected to a fitting at the top of the pump body. It took about half an hour of intense aerobic work to lift that much water up to fill the 18" to 12" tapered suction pipe and 24" diameter pump body, which sat a good 8 to 10 feet above the water. All the air had to be evacuated in order for the pump to "catch" and start pumping water up and over the dike. As you might expect, this system of pipes and valves had minor air leaks, so that one dared not stop pumping for fear that much of the work would be wasted. Once the pump was primed, it was time to start the engine. On the engine cylinder, there was brass needle valve attached to a pipe that led directly into the cylinder. The valve was opened by unscrewing the top. Once unscrewed, it revealed a 1/4" hole in the side of the valve above the valve seat. When open, the engine could be turned by hand with a fair amount of work. As the flywheel was turned, the port would blow air out of the cylinder above the piston head when on the compression stoke. Once it started to suck air in, we would add a "sip" (about a tablespoonful) of gasoline and two shots of diesel by operating the fuel injector by hand with the handle provided. Once the engine stopped sucking air into the cylinder through the port, we closed the valve and the engine was primed to start.

Jesssus H Christ ! I ran to get my cap out of storage just watching you guys! God bless your hearts!

thanks for showing us this great old engine. and thanks to Alan James wherever you are.

The engine had no muffler. Instead, it had a 4" cast iron pipe about 10 feet long attached directly to the exhaust port. Before the engine got warmed up, the exhaust contained visible smoke. During this time, the engine would blow visible smoke rings that could travel 30 feet or more while growing up to 18" in diameter! The exhaust was loud enough, you could hear it running from at least half a mile away... Thump, thump, thump at somewhere around 90 beats per minute. This was as fast as it could run under load. Since the engine fired every other rotation, the engine was actually running around 180 RPM. The engine had to be monitored continuously to be sure the cooling water stayed at the right temperature (about 180 degrees) and none of the lube boxes ran dry, or the main belt started slipping. We had a waxy substance that could be applied to the running belt to prevent slipping. There was never any lack of things to do to keep the pump running during your shift. As you can imagine, it was extremely difficult to start the engine by yourself. For one, you had to turn the flywheel and pour gasoline in the the port at the same time. And if you weren't exhausted from priming the pump, you certainly were by the time everything was running. Usually, we had two or more people to start it up. Since I was the youngest, I got the privileged of having to start it by myself after all the siblings were out of the nest. I was amazed to see the ease with which the man in the video was able to start the engine with compressed air compressed using a small engine of the same design of it's big brother. Either this was an earlier model or the diking district that bought the engine originally had done it on the cheap! Some of the comments here have been about the lack of safety precautions made while running the engine in the video. Looking back, I'm amazed that none of us got killed or maimed running this thing. The person starting the engine was always at risk of being thrown back from the engine. None of the belts were guarded. To open or close the knife valve at the pump discharge, one had to walk about a dozen feet along the 18" steel pipe, which ran above and just feet from the belt between the engine and the pump. It would have been so easy to fall into the belt. It makes me shudder just to think about it now. I'll never know why Dad didn't build a catwalk over the length of the pipe so it was safe to get to the valve. The best approach was to run so you didn't have time to get off balance. My practice was to err toward the direction of falling away from the belt if I were to fall which sometimes happened. For the past 15 years, I have had ringing ears and some hearing loss: It's no wonder. I didn't even know what hearing protection was. Once all six kids grew up, Dad had no reasonable way to keep the engine running for days on end, so he bought a used electric pump from another district and installed that in it's place. He sold the whole setup to a fellow who was a collector. I have no idea what came of it after that. Eventually, the island was sold to a land conservation group who plans to breach the dike and let the water rush in and out. They said the flooded land would make a great habitat for salmon fry to rest and grow up some on the way to the ocean. It pains me to think how much work went in to clearing , fencing, draining and planting the land. But alas, the farm was Dad's dream and all we saw was a lot of hard work and had little interest in continuing. Now the whole thing is but a fading memory. Proof positive that nothing last forever.

There are a bunch of old hit and miss rotting away in northwest and north central PA from the old oil field days kinda sad just seeing them rust away

My uncle has one of these Model N behemoths. He rescued it from a farmer's field in Nevada when I was a little kid and finally got it running again just after I graduated high school.

To start the engine, dad would pull himself up in the air with one foot on a spoke and his hands on the rim of the the flywheel. This would start the engine turning in the direction opposite of what was needed to run the pump. Once he reached the ground, he moved his foot to another spoke while he continued pulling on the flywheel. Part of the learning curve was discovering exactly which spoke to have your foot on when making the final push to maximum compression. You had to be sure to not lock your knee at this point, because if we had given it too much gasoline, it had the potential of throwing a person right through the roof! If everything was "just so" and we got the flywheel turning fast enough, it would compress the diesel and gasoline mixture to to the point where it would auto-combust somewhere near the top of the compression stroke. If we were lucky, the engine would fire with enough force make it past top dead center on the counter rotation (which is the direction we wanted it to run). The fuel injector was run off a cam off the main crankshaft. There was a handle mounted on the rod such that you could pump fuel in manually, or stop the flow of fuel completely by hold the lever hard over. Sometimes the engine began to rock back and forth firing before reaching top dead center and/or without enough momentum to push the cylinder past top dead center against the force of the exploding fuel in the chamber. When this happened, it took a good deal of skill and timing to add a shot of extra fuel or withhold it at just the right times to get the engine to start running the right direction (it could run equally well in either direction). If the engine got too warm during this period, it was almost impossible to get the engine running, since the fuel would explode even sooner with the increased temperature. If that happened, we had to just stop and wait for things to cool down. Once the engine was running, and depending on how long it had taken to get it running, we always had to "top off" the main pump and suction with the manual pump so that the system once again contained no air. Then we had to run back up past the engine exhaust and around the engine itself so that we could engage the pulley on the left flywheel. Once that was engaged, we ran to open the 12" knife valve on the discharge side of the pump. This had to be done quickly, or the pump would lose prime. If that happened, we would have to shut the engine down and restart the entire process. You knew you had a success when you could hear the engine slow down and start firing hard under load. Needless to say, once everything was running, we did our best to keep it running 24 hours a day for days while it pumped until the pump had pumped the water so low that the intake pipe lost suction. It took so much time for the water to get to the network ditches and sloughs inside the island, that there was enough water to fill everything back to almost the level it had reached before we started pumping within 24 hours of stopping pumping. We repeated this process until it took less than 8 hours to pump the water out to the bottom of the suction pipe. It was only then that we knew we were done for at least a week. This went on for as long as the "freshet" (high spring flood waters) was finished.

Great work by persons of that time. I love this work.

Many people might find this video boring. Those who cherish the evolution of machine and engine technology would find this video fascinating, as did I! I understand the love for these hit and miss engines, that many restore and demonstrate these at fairs, as I operated an maintained the three generation WW2 power generator, at the family’s cabin for years until retiring it. It’s stored in it’s original crate, and may run again someday, but needs new rings.

10 seconds in and I'm upvoting this! When I was a kid, I thought these things were deep magic from the ancients.

Glad to know this engine has been preserved. There is something magnificent about being able to see it operate.