Oh yeah “"fearfully respectful", that’s good, that old time stuff was before osha haha.
Safe as long as you never take your mind or eyes off what your doing.
Those flat belts had a nasty habit in that the cleats that held the sections together would often fail an leave something like the end of a big staple, shaped like a hook, whizzing along the belts travel. These could snag your shirt or you if you weren’t careful..
I’ve got a big old engine that powered flat belts once and is full of safety features too, kind of like a big open knife switch. (below)
It’s a dainty 6600 Lbs for the engine, 48 inch dia 7 inch wide flywheels, an 8 by 12 bore and stroke and a whopping 15 HP at 350 RPM.
Having been made in 1919, Its slightly hard to start by “modern terms” but you can do it (just like moving it around I suppose).
It starts by filling the injection pump reservoir with kerosene to make starting easier than on diesel and filling the blow torch..
Once filled, one starts a fire in the kerosene blow torch which heats up the torch body and you pump up the air supply.
This only takes a few min or so. Once the torch is blasting, you heat the ignition “glow plug” in the cylinder head with the up firing torch for 45 min or so.
This is a good time to feed mosquitoes while you anxiously monitor the roaring flame and keep the torch pumped up with air.
When you can see part of the head is red hot, it is time to go.
You climb up on top of the engine and give the oiler 50 fast turns of the crank to send oil everywhere and then lower the torch setting.
Having a dry crankcase, most of the used oil eventually drips out into a “drool bucket” below with the blackest filthy oil you can imagine.
You, open the compression release and rotate the flywheels back 2/3 from top dead center. You close the compression release, grab the injection pump handle and give it a squirt, then and this is the fun part, you step up on a wheel spoke, grab a flywheel spoke high up and hang off of it to get it going as fast as you can. When it comes up on compression, if everything is right, it stops with sort of a clunk and then reverses direction and then goes CHUUF out the 5 inch pipe with a modest cloud of grey smoke. If your lucky, it fires again next time around and picks up speed and your home free.
Oh, yeah, you have to let go of the flywheel and do not intersect it or other bitd while rotating.
I like to set it to run about 90 Rpm, it has a nice thump thump thump along with a bunch of mechanical noises. To hear a bunch of old engines running is sort of like music.
Best,
Tom Danley
Somewhere on 35mm slides I have some warning signs from White Sands that were humorous.
One picture I took was a Black Brandt rocket booster on a 4 wheel trailer, halfway pointed out a big set of open doors towards the desert, with a sign that said “No Smoking”. The perfect Bart Simpson moment.
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Topic: Your favorite warning labels (Read 12876 times)