1936 Midget engine from Popular Mechanics magazine plans

[Aerostar55]

Here are some pictures of my Midget engine. It has an 1-1/4 inch bore and is built from castings. The first part of the magazine article had drawings for making the patterns for the Crank case halves, the Cylinder, cylinder head, Cast Iron flywheel, brass connecting rod, venturi, and timer points bracket. The rest of the parts are machined. It would be pretty easy to machine the cylinder and piston from bar stock.

Quite a few of these engines have been built and they do run pretty good.

 

[johnmcc69]

Very cool!

John

 

[Jasonb]

Ah it's your engine that first made me aware of the design when on of your videos popped up on Youtube so thanks for that. I ended up cutting mine from solid and scaled it down to 24mm bore and made a few other alterations.

 

[Aerostar55]

Ah it's your engine that first made me aware of the design when on of your videos popped up on Youtube so thanks for that. I ended up cutting mine from solid and scaled it down to 24mm bore and made a few other alterations.

Jason, excellent build. I had been thinking of making a 1 inch bore version of the Midget for quite some time, because really the Midget isn't very small. Remarkable how your engine sounds exactly like mine! Thanks for sharing this.

 

[ironman]

Similar to the Upshur single.

 

[mu38&Bg#]

So from Popular Mechanics Shop Notes 1938? I found it here. The Librum Popular Mechanics Shop Notes ILL Archive Download the .exe and it opens a viewer.

 

[rogbo]

Great build from a classic magazine.
I hope it's not hijacking the thread, but I recently found archive dot org, where quite a few classic magazines lost to time are scanned and published. Below is a link to whole year of 1936 popular mechanics available to read on line, download individually, or by the year.
https://archive.org/details/PopularMechanics1936/Popular_Mechanics_01_1936

 

[ironman]

I usually go to google books for most of my old stuff.

 

[rogbo]

I'll try Google books, I just found archive.org looking for a mechanical drawing book.

 

[Richard Hed]

I usually go to google books for most of my old stuff.

Neither goggle nor archiveX have everything but they both have a lot. There are others out there too, Gutenberg and others both free and for sale

 

[Canyonman]

Not to HiJack, quick question. I found Archive dot org but inaccurate info with archiveX. Might you have the URL? Thanks Ken

 

[Aerostar55]

Ah it's your engine that first made me aware of the design when on of your videos popped up on Youtube so thanks for that. I ended up cutting mine from solid and scaled it down to 24mm bore and made a few other alterations.

Looks awesome. I've often thought of building a scaled down version with a 1 inch bore.

 

[Arild]

Looks awesome. I've often thought of building a scaled down version with a 1 inch bore.

It eager to do higher rews, why dont you!?

 

[gjrepesh]

Nice work!