The distillate/kerosene tractors would not start on these fuels with a cold engine. There was a whole process for starting. If the engine happened to have been stopped on the heavy fuel, you had to drain the carburetor through the little petcock on the side. Then you turned on gasoline, started the engine normally, and waited for the engine to heat up. To do this, you closed the radiator shutter via the little crank that's down under the fuel tank. You had to watch the heat indicator, of course. When you judged the engine hot enough to work, you closed the gasoline valve and opened the valve from the main tank. The shutter had to be manipulated to keep the engine hot enough to work, but not allow overheating. If an engine like this were allowed to idle very long, it would spit and sputter when you tried to open the throttle. I went through all this just once with my father's 10-20, and decided it was one big hassle. I suppose if the fuel really was a lot cheaper, it would have saved some money in the long run. One of the things about these tractors that is not so obvious is that they have a lower compression-ratio than gasoline tractors, and even when run on gasoline, will produce a bit less power than the high-compression models. If you were to try to run kerosene through a high-compression engine, you would get some very heavy knocking (like in a diesel!) and probably damage the pistons. Earlier tractors had a "spark lever" that allowed the driver to retard the spark if he heard any knocking. Some tractors even had "water injection" (just a little jet that let some water from a small tank into the manifold).
I am not aware that the distillate models of the H had any way to retard the spark in case of knocking. Do any readers know how this was handled in this tractor series, or wasn't it a problem? My experience with kerosene was confined to the 10-20 I mention above. Did spend a lot years on a kerosene-distillate H and then a gasoline model, so am pretty familiar with them in general.
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Today's Featured Article - Old Time Threshing - by Anthony West. A lovely harvest evening late September 1947, I was a school boy, like all school boys I loved harvest time. The golden corn ripens well and early, the stoking, stacking,.... the drawing in with the tractors and trailers and a few buck rakes thrown in, and possibly a heavy horse. It would be a great day for the collies and the terrier dogs, rats and mice would be at the bottom of the stacks so the dogs, would have a busy time hunting and killing, all the corn was gathered and ricked in what we c
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