7/11/2023 0 Comments Hit and miss engine sparkbox![]() I made an inventory of missing parts and sketched out a restoration strategy for this rusted engine remnant. Fortunately, this is one of the more common Dempster engines. An exact date is unknown as there is no Dempster engine registry. Engines manufactured up to about 1922 were typically igniter fired using a right-hand mounted Webster Tri-Polar Oscillator magneto, after which they apparently went with the popular WICO magneto.Īfter more research, I confirmed this was a hit-and-miss, igniter-fired Dempster Model 1K, 1-1/2 hp engine, serial number 12897, manufactured about 1920. ![]() ![]() The 4-cycle engines were introduced after 1900 and looked similar to early Olds engines, with a vertical, box-like water hopper. Their first gasoline engines were 2-cycle models and were introduced around 1898. started in 1878 in Beatrice, Nebraska, making windmills and water-pumping farm equipment. I learned later that Charles Randall “Randy” Aldous passed away only a month after our meeting. Yet I simply didn’t have the heart to say no, so I made arrangements to bring the sad old engine to my shop in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Besides being heavily corroded and seized, many parts were missing. I was not familiar with Dempster engines, but I could immediately see this would be a challenging restoration! It had been sitting outside exposed to the elements for many years. Well, of course I said yes and went down to see Randy and his engine. He had read my story in the October/November 2012 Gas Engine Magazine, “A Farm Team Resurrected,” of the restoration of a 1917 Fairbanks-Morse Z and its companion Typhoon pump, and wanted to know if I would be interested in the engine.Ī Vietnam veteran, Randy was at the tail end of life with advanced cancer, and didn’t want the old engine that had been a lifelong companion to go to the scrapyard after he died. Randy Aldous had a Dempster Mill 1-1/2 hp engine he’d found on a farm in Aberdeen, Idaho, as a teenager and had hauled around for 55 years, never having had the money or time to restore it. The email note came unexpectedly in October 2012 from a nearby engine collector I’d never met.
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