man! i've worked on a lot of engines. never
seen anything like this. i gotta show you this this is crazy. hey there, welcome to
farm craft. i've got a surprise in this truck. so what we have here is a johnson outboard.
it's a seahorse five horsepower motor, and this was purchased brand new by my grandfather
in the 50s. so this is a two-stroke. you have to mix the fuel. it's got one cylinder and
5 horsepower. and hopefully i'm not going to find anything here that i can't fix or
get parts for. the story on it is: the thing will not pull. and hopefully, i can't do this
with just one hand, but it it will not pull. hopefully the engine isn't seized and it's
the starter mechanism that's broken. as far as i can tell this thing has not run... i
am certain it has not run in 40 years. i'm 48 years old. it may not have run since i've
been alive. it has been a very long time. this is the the fuel cap. that's seized up,
that won't come off. i'm going to need a pipe wrench to get that off. this is, you can see,
you can change the lean leanness or richness of your burn with that knob. and this is what
you push to prime. this is your throttle. stop, slow, start, and then fast. and it has
a clutch on it, so this is to put it in neutral, and then when you want it to engage the prop
you throw it like that. let me see, what else. it has a thing over here that i think is just
a fuel shutoff. i'm not sure what that is, but it it's a hard stop there ,but it'll keep
turning left to there. and then the lower unit looks like it probably has a leak because
this is pretty oily. so this motor has been sitting in my father's garage for as long
as i can remember, and i've never seen it run, i've always wanted to see it run. that's
probably when i was five years old is my earliest memory of this. i'm excited i want to see
this thing run. let's pull this cover off and see what we
can see regarding this pull cord. kind of funny, old flathead screws. I guarantee
you nowadays these would be bolts. i mean they're not screws, actually i guess they're
bolts, but they're not hex bolts. The engine is not locked up. check that out. let me get this gas cap off. crusty. man, that is varnish. trying to show you down
in that tank. all that flaky stuff down there is probably dried fuel and rust. there you go, slightly better view. and the
cap is all covered with schmutz. let me show you the starter mechanism. the cable right
here looks like it's going down underneath where it doesn't belong. i think it's supposed
to be up on this upper wheel. you can actually see that it's it's rope in there. this was
a cloth rope with a central cable core, and obviously that rope would have long since
broken if it wasn't for the steel. so the mechanism is not locked up. i can i can roll
it and i can pull it until it gets to that cable jam. so hopefully if i loosen this screw
i will be able to get that out of there, and not have everything go springing sproinging
everywhere. we don't need any of that. come on. man that thing is on there. this actually
i think goes all the way through to this cap nut here. i think that's what you call that.
whatever. Tappy, tap, tap. there we go. all right so that loosened up
now i don't want it to come springing sproinging on me. i know a bunch of you probably do.
you want to see exactly that. yep, the cable was wrapped in underneath where
it did not belong. Tighten that back down. look at that. there you can see the rope that was supposed
to be on it. that cable is just too thin. i suspect someone
pulled to start it and when it rolled back up it that thin cable was able to get up underneath
where it didn't belong. when i pull this and these things come out
they are going to engage on these teeth. and these teeth are actually angled. so like if
you go from one to the next you hit it. but if you go the opposite direction you would
not hit it. so obviously this is the direction that that it's meant to turn. so it engages,
those things hit, and then that transfers the power of your pull into this rotational
power of spinning the motor. you see what i see? two spark plugs. that
would be a two cylinder engine. so let's do a little walk around here. you can see our
two plugs. so this is the head. go to this side, you can see that's where the cylinders
are. and down here is the crank case, and it's obviously in line with the with the central
shaft which is your crankshaft. so the pistons are transferring power into the shaft there.
back on the other side this is our intake. and this is our carburetor, it's a funny looking
carburetor to me. but it's old and i'm not used to working on two strokes so maybe it's
not funny looking it's just funny to me. up inside there is gonna be the magneto. that's
going to generate power send electricity to the spark plugs. yeah this is the fuel shutoff
valve there. that's the out of the fuel tank and into the carburetor. that's probably the
air intake right there. is there no air filter on this thing? that's crazy. i must say i'm
really kind of tempted to spray some starting fluid into the intake and see if it'll fire.
i bet you it would. because i found a broken starter cable. that's probably why this thing
was set aside and not used anymore. hopefully the engine was in good working condition and
that's what i was told, when it broke. now, maybe it wouldn't run, and they were pulling
and pulling and pulling on the starter until it broke and then they gave up. so you never
know. but if i'm lucky this thing will run. what i don't want to do right now though is
start it up and pull whatever junk is in this carburetor or in these fuel lines into it
and just make things worse. i really want to open up the carb and take a look at that
before i mess something up. so let's take that off. i lied. first i'm going to take
these spark plugs out and just get a look at them. oh man. wow. the end of the plug isn't wet but the threads
are wet which i assume is old oil from the gas mix. yeah it seems like it's oil. that's
good. that means i probably don't have a bunch of rust inside my cylinders. plug is tucked up under here i can't get a
socket on it. that's why i'm using this wrench. man. these plugs are different. and i am willing
to bet that they are supposed to be the same. i don't think johnson would make this with
a different plug in each cylinder. I see a fair amount of carbon on the top of
the pistons. makes me want to take the head off and look at them but i don't think...
let's look at this carburetor, and you know if it's not running great, well then we'll
have to to dig further. but who knows? i might go through the carburetor and this thing might
run. from what i can see there's only two things
holding this carb on. and it's this nut which is on a stud. you can see the gasket right
there. and then this flathead bolt. that is the primer pump, which is up here
on top, and when you spin it it makes it more lean and rich so it is moving a jet right
there. Something else is holding it. oh yeah, another
fuel line. shockingly my metric wrenches aren't the right size. you believe that? i'm predicting this is going to be a little
fiddly to get back together. man, how long are those threads? seems like when they give
you a nut that you can't really get too easily they make the threads twice as long, just
for fun. just to give you a little challenge. got that off. and i've got one more attachment that is our
throttle. i'll see if i have a cotter pin that could
take the place of that when we put it back on. so let's take this carb over to the bench.
okay so this was our fuel in. so i am betting you that that will be where you would drain
the bowl, but i doubt anything's going to come out. nada. like the spark plugs there's a little
bit of oil on the threads. i think this being a two stroke is probably going to help a lot.
this is the only potential air intake that i see. it pushed itself up for some reason. why did
it do that? all right, so that pin just goes in there
and that... that's a cool little mechanism. so this pin allows this to go up and down
when you're pumping, but then when you twist, that twist gets transferred to this which
is the jet. so that is metering fuel. there you go, nice little needle valve there.
and here's our float. i got to show you this, this is crazy. i must say i've never seen
an actual cork float, and there's like this retention thing. so the needle is through
the cork, that's cork. and they just put this piece of wire and a screw down in there to
hold that needle in place. apparently that's how these were manufactured, but to me that
looks like a a redneck, cobbled together like "i'm gonna make my own float." Don't ever
underestimate a redneck man, they can do lots of stuff. here can you see down the bottom of that bowl.
it doesn't look bueno. i'd really like to clean that out, and i could just spray some
carb cleaner. but it'd be nice to get this float out of here. speaking of rednecks, this
is how i could kind of test the needle. when this comes up it should cut off the fuel flow.
well so that means if i blow air into this and then lift that it should block the air. it actually seems to be working quite well. right down in here there's a fine screen,
and i'm happy to say it looks pretty clean. i think it's attached to this gasket which
is dry and cracked. i'll see if i can find a rebuild kit for one of these but for now
i'm gonna leave that as it is. it just looks like junk in there. let's see
if i can blow that out. schmutz. well that one communicates with that. this
one here communicates into the bowl now. so that is how our fuel is getting from the bowl
to the carburetor, so that is very critical. this is carb cleaner. carb cleaner feels real good in cuts by the
way. unfortunately i have to take this float out. in spite of trying to clean it there's
still just, i can see tons of gunk in the bottom of the bowl, and i can't effectively
clean it like it is. so we're going to take this float out. so it looks to me like i need
to take this screw out, which is barely in there. Aye Yai Yai. almost more just sitting there than anything.
then i need to get this piece of wire. it's in a groove on the needle, so i can't get
the needle out with that wire there. trying to be gentle so i don't damage the cork. and push that wire out of the way. okay. there's that piece of wire. now i should be
able to push this, oh wow. there it goes. it's coming right out. so it comes down like
that. and now there's your cork. wow. it really is just a cork. it's not even square. look
at that. you see the this edge is not even parallel with that edge. they just lop off
a piece of cork and stick a needle down the center. that's absurd. that shouldn't work. so i think you can see
here this little piece of wire is kind of springy, and it goes through that groove right
there. so once this gets pushed through the cork, and then that wire goes over that, this
is trapped and it's not able to move. so the cork, it looks like they put some kind of
enamel coating or something on it, which protects it from the fuel. so this end of the needle
is tapered and that meets with the seat that is up inside here, and we'll look more at
that later. in modern carburetors both the needle and the seat are easily replaceable.
in this carburetor the seat is integral to this carburetor housing which can be a problem,
because you can't just replace the seat if it's leaking. most of the gaskets i've come
across, i can either easily replace or they don't look too bad. these little screws they
had these things on there that looked like look like they were rubber, and now they're
all dry and cracking up. well they go on these little bolts here. so i could either use some
fuel resistant gasket maker like this, or i have a set of o-rings this o-ring goes on
there quite well and then once you screw it in the o-ring kind of flattens out acts i
mean almost exactly like the gasket would have. i somehow failed to film cleaning out
the bowl, but you can see that it turned out looking really good. cork goes in first. needle falls right into place. there we go. as i'm putting this thing back
together some things need lube, and i'm just using two cycle engine oil because that's
what's going to end up all over it anyway. so a trick to not cross thread screws, i just
did right there. i wasn't sure if it was threading right. go backwards with a little bit of downward
pressure until you feel it pop. like that. here i'll do it again. pop. so the threads just aligned so you know
it's ready to thread right now. so if you're ever in doubt, that's the that's the thing
to do. don't just say oh maybe it's just not threaded great, and it's a little tight. because
if you cross thread it, you really screw things up. now if you're just threading into a nut,
no big deal. you get a different nut and bolt. but if i cross thread into this carburetor
body which is what i would be doing, you just cause yourself a whole bunch of headache. this is probably a bad idea but i'm gonna
do it anyway. i've got the carburetor off. there's no chance of anything from the fuel
tank or anything, the fuel lines, getting in there. so if i put the spark plugs in and
hit this with a little bit of ether it might fire. the only issue is is there wouldn't
be any lubrication going with that. it wouldn't run very long. so i'm gonna put a little two
cycle engine oil in each cylinder and turn it over by hand a little bit. then i'm gonna
see if we can make it fire. that'd be exciting. so this is two cycle engine oil. just a little
bit. i'm going to pull by hand. all right so that oil should be well distributed. and our pistons should be well lubricated.
tell me if any oil comes out of there. i think my starter cable just screwed up again.
all right i got the plugs back in. i'm going to use a drill on top to spin it. here's some
starting fluid. let's see what happens. nothing. i would have expected more than that. whole lot of nada. i wonder if i'm not getting
spark. so small engine troubleshooting: you need three things for it to run. you need
compression, you need fuel, and you need spark. well i just sprayed it with fuel. so let's
see if we're getting spark. i'm gonna hold this lower plug against the block you should
be able to see a spark right there at the gap. hopefully this isn't going to shock the
heck out of me. oh yeah i can see both of them sparking actually. so we've got spark. good, good. so you know,
i said we got spark, good, but that might not be good. because i sprayed starting fluid
in there with spark it should have fired. unless maybe something's clogged and the starting
fluid didn't actually get to the cylinders. that's a possibility. but this is a compression
test kit. now not everyone's going to have one of these, but they're not terribly expensive
if you do some work on small engines i recommend you get one. basically what you do, you've
got a couple different sizes and adapters for different size spark plugs. this is the
one for this plug. i'm going to plug these together and then turn it over and this is
going to read the level of compression that i'm getting in each cylinder. you don't have
to crank these down real tight. 66. if i do it faster i get up to 76. yeah i don't
know what that means. i don't know what the expected compression on this engine is, but
we have another cylinder. if they're the same they're probably fine. that one went up to 84. so 76 and 84. they
are pretty close. so i've got spark, i've got at least some compression, so what's going
on here? i've got one more thing to try, just to see if we can get this thing to fire off.
so this is fuel mix. this is what i use in my chain saws. 50 to one gasoline two cycle
engine oil. so i'm going to squirt, maybe a little bit more than that, straight into
the cylinder, and then goes the plug. okay. if it doesn't fire now, what the hell?
we've got spark, we've got reasonable compression, we know there's fuel in there because we just
put it in. let's see what happens. this is a sketchy way to start something. oh it fired. all right i think it's out of fuel. but it
definitely fired and it was bucking and it was trying to go so, awesome. what i need
to do is get this fuel tank off, clean it out, put it back together and see if it'll
run. i was thinking getting this fuel tank off was going to be a big ordeal. uh nope.
no they built things differently in these days. it's four bolts here here and then two
more over here. i've got three of them out this is the last one. oh there's the. yeah this is the only thing that's left. see
that goes down through it disengages and engages the prop but it also looks easy to take off. and there you go. so i think there might actually still be some
fuel in this. oh yeah. yeah that's why i didn't start cranking on it with the uh carburetor
still attached. that doesn't even look like gasoline. it's like turpentine. you ever wonder
why engines with old gasoline in them won't run at all? well this is why. this is the
stuff that came out of that tank. let's light it. careful now. it won't burn. it's not gasoline anymore. this is the where
the fuel comes down and goes into the carburetor. i've got this all the way open and i cannot
blow any air through it at all. it's all just coming right back at me. nothing. i've already tried unscrewing this
fitting, but it's so tight that i was afraid i was going to break something. i've got to
get that apart. and looking at this thing and i assumed this was just a fitting that
you know just screwed into the bottom of the tank but when i feel up in there if there's
a tube. i suspect it has small holes in it for the fuel to come through. so that's got
to come out of there. so i'm going to try heat. not too much heat because this tank's made
of aluminum, which is a good thing because it doesn't rust. hey look at that heat does the job. not what i was expecting. i think that is actually a screen. that is
a completely clogged screen. so i'm going to soak both of these in carb cleaner overnight.
been a day soaking in carb cleaner. definitely softened it up. inside still looks
a little rough. it even cleaned up the outside of the fitting. oh yeah. that just came out of there. and
there's still more junk in there. huh of course the screen's removable. you
just couldn't tell because it was glued in before with all the junk. i did some research
online and it seemed to be the best at removing the varnish from old gas tanks was denatured
alcohol, which i don't think will have any issues with the aluminum. you know i don't
want to put acid in there and start eating away my gas tank that's probably not replaceable.
this definitely needs more work. it's it's very heavy and there's a bunch of junk down
here still, and i think i'm going to try denatured alcohol for this. and then i'm gonna put a healthy amount in
this tank. while i was waiting on the alcohol to clean
the inside of the tank i decided to clean the outside too, also with alcohol. alcohol's taken that junk off of there, but
i want to make sure it's not taking the decal off too. well that looks a little different. essentially
that's before, and that's after. well i'm actually thinking that alcohol is probably
not a good thing for that decal. they sell new ones if i ever want to put it on there.
i mean this thing's in such bad shape, that i'm not really too worried about it. previously i couldn't even get air to go through
that. all right let's see how our alcohol looks now. nice. could not blow air through this before. i don't know if you can see it but that looks
much better already. while i'm waiting for the fuel tank i'm going
to go ahead and clean this up. i've got this aerosol super clean degreaser. never used
it before. it actually says it's biodegradable, supposed to be pretty good stuff. i can see it all dissolving already. hopefully not eating the paint off. gonna need a little bit more, but hey you
know i think that stuff worked pretty well. so there it is after one more application
and wiping it down, and i'd say that looks pretty good. oh much better. i think i'm going to call
that good. so this is the screen for the gas tank. it's not actually a screen. it almost
looks like little tiny particles glued together so that it makes tiny openings around them.
i've seen stuff like this before but i don't know how it's made. i also find it interesting
they were making these in 1952, and i'm wondering if anyone out there knows how it's made. it's much cleaner. gas flows through it easily
now. so i think we can put this back together. if you turn it over it's gonna fall out. how
about we take some fuel resistant gasket sealant and we put a little bit around there and put
it down in there. that's good. that's well affixed. so i'm going
to put a little bit more of this gasket maker on the threads. i actually got hold of a pdf file of the manual
for this so i was able to read the high speed needle setting is three quarters of a turn
out, which i've already set. and it actually has a low speed on it too which is kind of
interesting, because uh it's not in the carburetor. so the low speed needle is this right here.
so this turns. that is a rotary vane pump, they say, and it controls the idle speed.
so it's separate from the carburetor. i thought that was kind of interesting. hey, do you guys like variety? if you watch
this channel at all you know that i do, but the youtube algorithm actually doesn't. i
watch a lot of channels that do a lot of big variety of things and they may put out a video
that doesn't particularly interest me, and if i don't click on it, frequently when they
put out their next video youtube doesn't show it to me, because i didn't click on their
last video. the algorithm is pretty simple. even though you've subscribed to them and
said hey i like this channel, if they show you a video, maybe two, and you don't click
on them, they're not going to show you anymore. so what can you do? well you can click the
bell. it basically is a mechanism that tells youtube that you want to be notified of every
video that this channel puts out. you know, the best thing you can do is just click on
every video i make. no i mean, i get it. you know i do all sorts of things. i work on motors,
do construction projects, i do machining, metal casting, woodworking, life hack videos,
chainsaw videos. not everyone's going to be interested in all those things. so just realize
if you don't click on a video or two, youtube is going to decide that you no longer want
to see stuff from that channel and they're not going to show you anymore. personally
i get bored with channels that do the same thing all the time. i like variety in my youtube
channels. i'm curious what you guys think. do you like variety? let's start our discussion
down in the comments. i wish the algorithm was better at realizing that yes you do like
variety, what you like is maybe metal casting videos from farmcraft, so that when i put
one out it would would put them in front of you. but from what i can tell it doesn't seem
to do that. i have a new rope on order for the starter
mechanism. what i did is i pulled it out enough and then put a knot in it so that it won't
retract to where it's just cable. you might assume that this is going to be
the same mix that everything is nowadays, which is a 50 :1 2 cycle oil to gasoline,
and you would be wrong if you did that. if you read this label one half pint of oil to
one gallon of gasoline. that actually comes out to 16 to 1. i did the lovely imperial
conversion calculations, and that comes out to 30 cc's of oil to two cups of gasoline.
so that's two cups of fresh non-ethanol gasoline. this engine's never seen ethanol and no reason
to start now. this is a 10cc syringe so i need three of these full of oil. it's good looking stuff. all right so i've got it rigged up with a
pail underneath. fill this up with water. i haven't checked the water pump, so the first
thing i'm going to do when this thing starts. right here there's a little hole that should
shoot a jet of water that indicates that the pump's working. if it's not flowing any water
i'm going gonna have to turn it off right away, assuming it runs. for those of you not familiar with outboards,
the water cools the engine, and it will quickly overheat if you don't have a functioning water
pump and circulation going through. and we're going to prime it. oh i can hear it okay it primed. place your
bets. does it run? it's alive... sort of. so i bet you the low speed needs opened up.
That's closed...let me open that a little bit more. uh i just went the other way with it that
helped. maybe. maybe just letting it sit for a minute
helped. Pump is working. all right. yes! it's alive! That is a beautiful thing. And it's not even
that loud. It's been idling for several minutes. It's
running really well, maybe a little fast. I'm going to adjust this low speed. That slowed
it down just a little. Maybe a little too much? No? Yes? okay that's a little touchy. all right so
i've got the carb back off obviously. so i noticed when it was running there was fuel
just pouring out of this hole, which that's just an open hole into the float chamber.
well what that tells me is that the float is not working. either the needle is not sealing
or the cork is no longer floating. so the simplest way for me to see if the float is
working or not is going to be ...... you
