Lucas Upper Cylinder Lubricant and Injector Cleaner

Place your hand on your wallet, turn 180 deg. and "RUN AWAY".....

Not sure I understand - can you clarify?

He means it's just a waste of money.

I use seafoam from time to time, not sure if it helps or hurts but I like to think it is helping. 

Clearer now, the guy who built the engine(s) for VS recommended it which caused me to ask

A race car driver who's car was sponsored by Marvel Mystery Oil was once asked about the effectiveness of the product and he replied " there's absolutely no evidence that MMO will harm the engine "....

Putting in place a good gas filtering system is your best bet to keep those idle jets free from clogging - the gas itself keeps them clean. Want some top end cylinder lube? Use a little Burris Hi Rev 2 stroke castor oil or Motul synthetic 2 stroke oil but be prepared for a little smoke. I used to use Marvel for top end but switched to Motul.

My uncle, Waldo, became a believer in Marvel Mystery Oil back in the 1950's.  

On our New England farm we had three Ford Ferguson tractors, all bought between 1941 and 1945 (yes, they kept building them through the War years but they shipped them with huge steel wheels without tires 'cuz the rubber went to the War effort).  

Waldo was a frugal New England farmer (most people around here just called him cheap) and didn't like to do things like oil changes (once every other year or so) or tune-ups....   He found that when a spark plug got coked up you could "make it better" by pulling the spark plug cap up high enough to make the spark jump the gap inside of the cap and, miraculously, it would run OK again.  I have seen this miracle but have no idea why it works.   Lots of times I looked at his tractor to see all four plug caps lifted up on the plugs, sitting there and held on by the rubber cap.

After a couple of decades of hard use, his tractor engine began to run rough - mostly it needed a valve job really badly because they were sludged up - and the extended plug gaps weren't doing it for him any more so someone told him about "Marvel Mystery Oil" and that, if he poured it right into the carburetor while the tractor was running it would clean things up and would run like new and didn't require any more work on his part.  Just...like...Magic.  He was all for that.

So he goes out to Spag's Discount store in Shrewsbury (sorry - you have to be from around here to appreciate Spag's) and got a quart of Marvel, removed the air cleaner hose and then realized that Ferguson tractors have an "updraft" carburetor - they pull from below, up into the intake manifold and sideways to the intake ports.  ???????????   What'cha gonna do?  That took a bit of cogitatin' but then he had an epiphany......

He walks over to the Cow Barn, a man inspired (all farms had several barns of different functions, like the "Sawdust Barn" where you stored dry sawdust for the cow's bed, the "Hay Barn" where you dry-stored the hay bales, the "Heifer Barn" where new calfs were born and so forth).  When he returned, he had a "Black Flag" bug sprayer that we used to kill the flies in the barn, like this:

He dumped out the remaining DDT (I know....I'm dating myself here) and poured in his fresh quart of Marvel Mystery Oil, "good for anything that ails you!"  He started his tractor, although it took a while and it puffed a bit of blue-ish smoke), pushed the throttle lever near the steering wheel to about half (once positioned, they stay in place)  and the engine settled into a rough mid-speed romp, shaking and quivering as it fought against whatever was wrong inside.  Waldo walked calmly around to the right side of the engine and, with masterful strokes, started pumping a bug-spray-cloud of Marvel Mystery Oil into the carburetor inlet.  Surprisingly, a lot of what he was spraying actually made it into the carb throat, even going uphill.  Once he got the swing of it, he really started pumping in ernest while working up a sweat, and I wandered over to see what was happening.   I was maybe 5 years old at the time.  "GORMAN!"  I hear from my German Grandmudder, over near the house...."Yoo get avay from der!  Yoo don' know WHAT is gornna happen!"  so I step back a few steps and sit on the lawn with Sally, our pointer dog, and watch the show.  

Meanwhile, Waldo is pumping his Black Flag sprayer like crazy and things are beginning to happen.  For one, some of the spray is NOT getting into the carb throat and is being blown back into his face by the engine fan, causing him to cough and wheeze and redden his eyes.  And for that spray getting sucked into the carb, it must have been doing something because a cloud of pure white smoke was beginning to grow from the exhaust pipe at the back of the tractor.  The harder he pumped, the more white smoke he caused but that must be a good thing, right? It's working!   So he kept pumping and pumping and Sally and I watched as the cloud of white smoke enveloped him while my Grandmudder yells "GORMAN!  Yoo brrring Sally over heer avay from all dat smooke!"  so we retreated to the house porch, Sally hiding behind me but peeking around my shoulder at the show in the yard.  

Just about then, three more things happened in rapid succession:  The tractor starts to run even rougher than it had been running, with this lope like one or two cylinders aren't working at all any more (there are only four, after all).   The white cloud completely enveloped both the tractor and my Uncle and AND he finally ran out of the quart of Marvel he had poured into the sprayer tank.  Now he looks worried - He put all that stuff in, all he got was a lot of smoke and it was now running worse!  

Suddenly, the smoke began to turn from white to a dingy gray, then grayer still, then really gray and about then, as it popped and snorted.............it started to run a bit better, like maybe one of those ailing cylinders miraculously got better.  Then it ran even better - maybe another cylinder got better, too!   The dingy gray smoke began to clear and after a few minutes it was running more-or-less smoothly.  Better than before he started?  I dunno......What the heck, I was only five back then and didn't know what to expect, but he wandered over to his machine and tried pushing the spark plug caps back down onto the plugs (always a dangerous move because you never knew when you were going to get Zapped by the spark, especially if your hands were moist).  Where all four had needed to be pulled slightly off to run before (most likely because the plug gaps had been oil-fouled), he found that he could replace three of them and it still ran just as well - the fourth still needed the plug wire to be elevated to run.  

The smoke finally cleared, Waldo felt (of course) that his tractor was, indeed, running better than before and his efforts weren't in vain and Sally and I were allowed off of the porch to investigate up close.  But.......Just about then, my mom called us in for lunch.  

Just another exciting day on the Nichols' farm.

Do you have any other gems about Waldo you can share with us?

For instance, where is he?

This whole TOWN is full of characters!  We were commenting on that as we left the grocery store just today!

That's the same tractor model (I think it's a model 20?), complete with the Ford winged radiator cap that never seemed to fit on quite straight but looked cool.  It had a 3-Speed crash box but some of them were fitted with an overdrive unit just ahead of the transmission, so the OD lever would have been on the left side almost in the center between the wheels, or on the right side (different OD manufacturer) just ahead of your knee.  Lots of farmers replaced much of the air in the rear tires with water and anti-freeze to provide lots of rear wheel weight without spending a lot of money.  I remember there were special fittings to connect a garden hose to the air fitting.  rotate the fitting to the top, hook up the hose, run for a minute or two, remove the hose to let the air rush out and repeat til the inner tube was almost full and stop and then add more air pressure til the tire looked good.

These were a perfect size tractor for both British farms (usually less than 40 acres) and New England farms (usually less than 100 acres) so Henry Ford bought the manufacturing rights and began building them in America in the 1930's.  There was a whole slew of attachments as part of the "Ferguson System" to incorporate mowers, balers, rakes, cordwood saws, all sorts of stuff.  That one above is fitted with a subframe for something out back - don't know exactly what as the frame for a front bucket (like a Lord dump bucket) or a snow plow extended from front to back and looks different than that.  Normally, you just used the adjustable, 3-point hitch on the rear for attachments, with a big drawbar full of holes for great flexibility in what you could pull.  

They were powerful little workhorses of 28 hp or so, but geared so low you really could pull stumps with them and we did, along with plowing, cultivating, mowing, raking, and cutting up hundreds of cords of wood over the years.  My grandparents huge, 6-bedroom house was heated with wood back in the 1800's - 1960's and burned through 10-12 cords per winter, all stored below the "Summer Kitchen" which was in an addition sticking out from the main house to allow breezes to flow through the kitchen and cool it off when using the Acorn wood fired kitchen stove in the summer.  In winter, the kitchen detail was moved into the main part of the house so that the kitchen stove helped to heat the house.   A lot of hardwood was cut on that farm over the decades.

I just remembered the process for changing the clutch!  You supported the tractor right in the middle on two columns of big blocks, then split the tractor in two just at the rear of the engine, rolled the rear half back a foot or two and then you could get at the clutch.  Sounds like a huge deal, but probably easier than pulling a Speedster engine.

No more stories of my Uncle just now........  Those old memories need a tickle to get them started and then they just flow.

My head hurts...

Yeah, mine, too.   Guess you guys have had enough for now, huh?

Never.....

Gordon, I say this as a writer: you can really write. Your stuff reminds me a little of Wendell Berry. 

Wendell Berry?  Thanks, but Naaaah.  And my words are too simplistic to compare to Pat Conroy, and the author that I have read the most is Issac Asimov or Tolkein (even slogged through “Silmarillion” - Don’t bother).  They’re all cool, but I just have the ability to type almost as fast as I think (not really...I usually have several streams going at once and could NEVER type that fast) so what gets typed is more like having a conversation with myself or someone else in the room.  A little weird, but that’s how it works.  Tougher on a virtual keyboard (I have to look at it more than a “real” keyboard) but either gets the job done. 

My stuff is more like Brooke Petrii, whom you’ve never heard of, but she wrote some of the best tech manuals I’ve ever read.  Just imagine taking a topic like the modular structure of an advanced operating system based on a 32-bit architecture and writing about it so that lay people could read it and actually understand it and use it to write their applications!

Like you, I bow to her common-sense intellect and sense of simplicity.  Plus, she never took any crap from me.  Or anyone else, for that matter.

Keep the stories coming, buddy, it's gold.