Re: MTD Yardman Transaxle Rebuild
Little secret: Sea Foam is just kerosene.
I doesn't look, smell, feel or - (well, I have to admit, I didn't actually 'taste' it) like kerosene.. I does however 'smoke' like kerosene.
What I want to know is this: If just slightly chocking the engine gets it to smooth out, does that mean the carb is set to lean? If I rich the mixture up just a little won't that do the same thing?
Speaking of kerosene, I'll bet none of you youngsters ever had to clean out the float-fuel-level assembly and a multi-wick burner for a wood stove conversion and trim all the wicks, have you? When I was a kid several of my relatives heated their homes with wood fired kitchen stoves that had been converted to burn kerosene. Two round canisters about the size of a number 10 can would be placed in the fire box after the grates were removed. Inside these canisters were a series of consecutively smaller round wicks, each separated by a steel ring (like a bottomless can). K-1 was fed to the bottom of the canister by a level control that sat on the floor behind the stove. K-1 was fed to it via gravity, meaning that your fuel tank sat outside the house up on legs high enough to be above the level of the float control. A carefully adjusted float allowed fuel into the bottom of the wick canister and once the wicks were trimmed correctly and ignited they kept the stove at a nice even temperature. All these houses stayed in the 80's all winter! The stove surface was just the right temperature for making soups, etc...
I looked on line to see if there was anything about these burners available. All I could find were some of the wicks on eBay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Origina...252844?hash=item5446555eec:g:MvQAAOSw5cNYJ5SH
My favorite Aunt was the last of my relatives to have a rig like this and I became her "oil" man, meaning that cleaning out the level control and trimming her wicks became my job. I don't know what the efficiency rating of burners like that would be, but once you had a 500 pound cast iron stove heated up, you sure as hell weren't going to be cold!
Ahhhhhh, the 'Good Old Days'....
Roger B