I have a lot of pictures here of these old engines and tractors,I'm sure some people have a hard time understanding how they worked.Here's a video of a wood tub washing machine that is powered by a hit n miss engine.I'll probably put more here as time permits over the winter,I have more on you tube,if your interested,you can find them here,http://www.youtube.com/user/bstrucker5278

 

It's a rainy chilly day in western,NY,I haven't been around for a while so I thought I'd better put something down here.I was in PA last weekend and went to a nice little engine show,some nice old engine displays,quite a few old tractors nice fall weather,food and fall colors.The show was put on by the Blue Mountain Antique Gas and Steam Engine club,it was held at their club grounds just south of Bangor,PA in the southern end of the Pocono mountains.

We went to Alexander,Ny last Friday evening,there's a steam engine club down that way and their annual show was last weekend.We didn't get down there until about 5:00 so we really didn't have enough time to see everything.I wanted to look for parts,so we hit the flea market vendors and the engines and skipped most of the tractors.It was a real nice show,laid out and organized very well,I wish I would have had a few more hours to look around.I like old small engines the best and they had quite a few nice ones on display.Most were Maytags but there was a Johnson Utilimotor and an Elgin Half a Hors that are a lot rarer than the Maytags,both were used on washing machines.There were a few upright Maytags and a nice model 82 also a bicycle that had a Maytag twin on it to power it.Those guys down there build all sorts of buggies for riding around on.There was another motor than I haven't identified yet,the one with the 2 flywheels,the 82 Maytag is the green one with the cylinderpainted black,it also has a brass carburator on it,the blue engine next to it is the utilimotor,then a couple of real nice stoveleg Maytags,these are the earliest engines Maytag built,then the Elgin with the covered flywheel and I'm not sure,I think the last one is a Maytag but Johnson also built an engine very similar,I'm not sure which it is.

 

I'm kind of on a roll today,so before I lose my train of thought,I'm going to try to put some of it down here.I grew up in an area of PA that gets a lot of different reactions from people when you tell them the name,Nescopeck.Nescopeck is along the Susquehanna River,as you travel north along the river,you come to Wapwallopen,Mocanaqua,Shickshinny and Nanticoke.The names come from the Indians that inhabited the area and in colonial America this was part of the original wilderness.The first settlers came up the river from he Northumberland area or down the river from the Wilkes Barre area,both Pennsylvania and Connecticut were laying claim to the land and trying to get people to settle there.Nescopeck had settlers in the 1790s but most of the surounding areas weren't settled until the 1800s.I started reading a late 1800s account of how the are was settled late last winter and I'm hoping to get back to it before too long but it's hard to imagine the problems that the people encountered and stories that have been passed down over the years either get blown out of proportion,watered down or completely forgotten.Getting back to the Indians,the towns that are there are on land that originally had Indian settlements,most were of the Iroquois nation and pieceful but there were some that weren't,I wish I new more about them but Indian history has never been something that I had much interest in.One more tidbit,in my pictures,there is an album of Wapwallopen,if you look at the pictures you'll see Council Cup,that was suppose to be where the Indians held their great Pow Wows,one of these days,I want to get back up to the top and get some pictures from up there,the view of the river is spectacular,there is an overlook up there that you can get to without too much trouble,on a good day you can see 20 or 30 miles of the river.

I was coming down from the area above the tressle and the power house while I was in the Powder Hole the other weekend and a doe crossed aout 20 yards in front of me,I was not in a good position to get any pictures and thought I had missed that opertunity but I decided to move slowly and see,once I got to the bottom,if I could get another chance.Well I guess,as Toby Keith would say,I'm not as good as I once was but I'm as good once as I ever was,when Igot to the bottom,her and a fawn were still there just a few yards farther away.Unfortunatly,the camera that I was using wasn't quite up to task for the stills that I took but I did get a minute of video that came out pretty good  

We were in Pennsylvania a couple of weekends ago for a family reunion,I've been wanting to take some pictures of the old Dupont Powder Co plant along the Little Wapwallopen Creek just a couple miles upriver from Nescopeck.I've been wanting to get down there all summer long but every time we're in PA I'm either to busy or the weather is bad.This weekend on Sunday morning,the weather was great so I made the trek down there,it really isn't that bad,the trail is pretty nice although recent storms have taken it's toll on some pretty nice hardwood and a few large Sycamore trees.There are files in my public folders from a Bucknell University professor that give a pretty detailed description of the powder works.It's always been an area that fascinated me as a young boy,some of the older boys would talk about grave markers in he church cemetary that mark the graves of a few of the people killed in explosions at the plant.As a teeager we hiked and swam and partied along the creek and especially at the falls,there have been a few people hurt and a couple years back,a young fellow from up river drowned,it's still a pretty popular place even though most of it is on private property.I was glad I got a chance to get down there,there are still more pictures that I want to take but it's been 10 years since I was down there last,hopefully it won't take that long to get back again.Time  and a few floods in the past 35 years have changed the scenery,in the one picture,the rusted metal pipe was the intake pipe for a waterwheel,you used to be able to walk up the pipe to get to the next leg of the trail along the creek,there are 2 more sets of smaller falls farther up stream but as you can see now,you can't anymore and getting to the upper part of the trail is pretty roundabout. 

This past weekend was one of the best balloon festivals in the northeast US.I really don't have any words to descibe it,the weather was great,enjoy.

Last week the pickers came through here harvesting sweet corn,they hauled 8 -10 35 ton loads just about every day.Thursday about 4:00 they started into about 200 or so acres a mile down the road from me,I went up Friday morning to watch them awhile and take some pictures,by noon on Friday they were headed down the road to find more corn to pick,it is quite an operation,these same pickers run all summer long,they also use them for harvesting peas and beans.

This past weekend the town of Churchville held their annual Country Fair,it's a nice event with food and craft vendors,a nice parade on Saturday with a good turnout of antique tractors,then on Sunday they have the antique tractor pulls,if you look around this sight,you'll see that I have a thng or hot rod cars and old tractors but I really love old hot rod tractors.They had a great turn out of tractors as always,a good crowd of people and nice weather,it made for an enjoyable afternoon.

I know that they used different materials for covering a roof in different parts of the country,in the northeast,they used cedar shakes on a lot of buildings,this it how they were made,I always thought they were a very nice cover for a roof or even an exterior wall,but it probably took all day to make enough to cover a roof.  

They have a building that they built a few years back on the club grounds,that houses a couple of stationary steam engines,the big one is an electric generator,which would have been used in the late 1800s and early 1900s to power the lights in a small town.The smaller engine is running a line shaft that would have been used at a plant to run machines,if you look along the wall,over the top of the green engine,you can see a couple of metalworking tools that it's running.The boiler making the steam for these engines is outside the building,it's as big as the boiler on a large locomotive,there is a picture of it at Flickr,most of the noise in the video is my 2yr old grandaughter,she was riding on my shoulders and having a great time,it didn't even bother her when they blew the whistle.  

Here is a short video clip of a steam traction engine powering a thrashing machine at the 2008 Pagent of Steam near Canandaiqua,NY. 

This past weekend was one of the biggest engine shows in the northeast,it's called the Pagent of Steam and it's held on the New York Steam Engine Association grounds near Canandaiqua,NY.We went on Saturday and had very nice weather,it was very muddy,though from torrential rains that they had on Friday,we were able to see all of the tractors,small engines and hit n miss displays without too much trouble,about half of the flea market area wasn't very accesible because of mud.I was able to get some good pictures along with a couple short video clips of some pretty amazing 50-100 yr old engines,most of which are in running condition.There are lots more at Flicker also.

 

 

 

Boy,I can't belive it's been this long since I stopped by,summer is flying by again,ours is short enough as it is.I've been putting more pictures at Flickr lately but this past weekend was a pretty good car show weekend,Friday night,2 on Saturday,with one that we missed.Here's a few pictures from last weekend,just to show I'm still arounThere's more to come,there is a truck show this weekend that I'm wanting to get to,hope the weather is good.

Boy it's been a while since I've been here,I spent all of last week in PA helping an old friend that's behind with his planting because of weather,a hurried schedule and long days don't leave much time for the internet so I'm trying to catch up a little.I was going to do this a week or so ago and didn't get around to it,when I was at the auction in PA a couple weeks ago there was an implement there that I had never seen except in pictures.This is an ice plow,actually there are 2 of them in the picture,the poles in the center are for a basketball hoop.The one in the foreground has a guide on it the one in the rear doesn't.Here is a picture from a book that I have about harvesting ice at Mountain Spring Lake in PA from the early 1900s that show an ice plow in use.Mountain Spring Lake was built by Albert Lewis,a lumberman,for the purpose of harvesting ice for cold storage.It was located on one of the highest mountains in PA,pretty far north and in one of the coldest parts of PA.It's an interesting story and another really cool lesson of life in a much simpler time.

I was in a part of PA that I had never seen before this past Saturday,there aren't many parts of PA that I haven't visited.If your ever traveling through PA and run across one of these,pay attentionI can think of quite a few places arond PA where you will find these,this was one that the sign doesn't do the hill justice.Most of the time you'll find them on 2 lane state roads,there are trucks that use these roads,most of them are doing local pickups and deliveries,i.e.milk tankers,log trucks and the like.So you may ask,what does this have to do with the title of this blog?Well,whenever I see one it reminds me of a couple old songs,one was by C.W.McCall called Wolf Creek Pass,the other was by Harry Chapin and was called 30,000 Pounds of Bananas,both are comical songs and I can assure you,if you ever had to take a truck down on of these hills,it's not a laughin matter but it's a way of life if you drive trucks in PA.The story of the Harry Chapin song is about a hill in Scranton,PA,that I've been on a few times,and a new driver hauling a load of bananas down that hill.If you get a chance,listen to the song and if you ever run across one of these signs,it'll give you a chuckle also.

Well it's been a while since I've updated my quest for a Maytag gas engine.I did stop in Conesus a couple of weekends ago to see a lady that said she had one,when I arrived at her place,she took me out to the shed where it was suppose to be,but it was missing,there were a few other old engines there,but no Maytag.As you can see from my last blog,the auction that I attended this past Saturday had a few,I checked them over pretty good,a few of them had pretty paint,but I was leary of the internals,the prices were pretty high,and it came down to the last 2,model 92 engines,the one was on a long base frame and I could see that it had been run and it looked like it was pretty sound,when the bidding ended,I was the owner.I tried a little bit to get it running this afternoon,but I could tell from the way the tank smelled,it hadn't been run recently,so I'm probably going to have to pull they carb and do some cleaning before I can put up any video but here are a couple of pictures.

It been an interesting weekend,I really wasn't going to go to PA again this weekend,with the price of gas and all,I had my mind made up not to go,that is until the middle of last week when I saw the add for this auction,this was a serious collection,there must have been forty hit-n-miss engines and no less than 12 Maytags but I was still on the fence.Then I got an email on Thursday from a fellow out at Fort Drum who had seen an add that I have on Craigs List for some '57 Chevy pickup parts,so there it was the SIGN that I was looking for,5:00 Saturday morning,I was on the road again.But I'm sure glad that I didn't miss this auction,it was just like Walmart for collectors of old engines.I probably won't put all the pictures here,there are quite a few,but they'll be in my albums and on Flickr.

Well,if you've looked around here a bit you'll get the impression that I like old things,I'm just a sucker for things old and mechanical.I always see this machine when I haul stone out of the quarry across the road,it's an impessive piece,not huge by todays standards but for the day it was working in,I'm sure it was huge.I've been wanting to get pictures of it for a while now,I was in the area yesterday,the weather was overcast but the pictures came out ok.For size reference,figure it's about as big as a small ranch style house.I have an update on this old beast,it's been IDed as a model 100 Marion railroad shovel built in the early 1900s.It originally rode around on a rail car which limited it's use to within a few ft of railroad tracks,eventually they made conversion kits to install the tracks and this one was retrofitted and that was probably when it went to work in the quarries.

I woke up a little after 6:00 yesterday morning,took the dogs out for their morning ritual,the sun was shining nice,but the river valley was full of fog,it's an interesting phenomonon,it has to do with the temperature of the water in the Susquehanna and the difference of elevation,throw in some steam from a nuclear power plant and wala,smokey mountains in PA.