Posted on Wednesday, March 07, 2007 - 09:05 am:

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Doug,

What a great find!!!

I am sending you several pictures of the Palmer Bros. Model they made from 1895-1900. Your engine is clearly of that period. My guess it it late rather than early as they seemed to have concentrated on marine engines for their first few years. The marine model engine was made in 1-1/2, 3, 5 and 7 hsp. If you give me a mailing address I will send you a brief pamphlet what I know about the marine model. In about 1901 Ray Palmer patented a cord wood saw rig with a similar model mounted on a wagon. The cooling tank was set up for thermo siphon hence no need for the marine water pump. The fuel tank was housed in the water tank and I wish Andrew would publish a close up of his remarkable model DS with its skid set up. (Not a wagon bed.) Battery box, gas and water tank set up.

Jewel of a find. The S added to the model letter signified Stationary engine. For practical purposes they are the same engine with separate trim like the fly ball governor and no water pump. Dual flywheels more along farm hit and miss engine style. The mixing valve was a typical swing check valve Palmer modified to act as a mixer. The early engines like this one have a butterfly in the transfer port which is the throttle controlled by the governor.

I have a model C that came from Ernie where the fly ball governor actually controls the lift on the mixing valve and the butterfly and bronze transfer pipe is no longer present as the transfer port is cast in the cylinder wall similar to your Model B.

Some of these engines are found with the marine flywheel on one end of the crankshaft and a hit and miss engine flywheel on the other end. I am not sure what the vertical pipe with strange brass fitting on the end is. My guess is it not factory and really a brass trim somebody added to the air intake. I also think that the whole intake piping is homemade with some on trying to accomplish the function of the Palmer mixing valve that got lost on the way to old age. I obviously could be wrong but I have never seen any Palmer document or engine that is even remotely similar. The petcock on the cylinder head should be a priming cup not petcock. That style petcock is very hard to find these days.

The igniter guide on the top of the cylinder should be a bronze casting.

The igniter guides are there and therefore the eccentric link to the igniter does not require the water pump barrel to guide the igniter.

Any idea of the bore and stroke of the engine???

We have the first Palmer ever made in our collection and it has the brass transfer port pipe with the butterfly in it. Raynal Bolling told me that Frank Palmer in 1940 had Ray get the first engine out of the basement of the office and restore it so they could take it to the boat shows. Ray said Frank told me that they didn’t have a clue how to throttle the engine so they added the butterfly and on the first engine that valve is there. Ray also said Frank told him they really never used it as their intake check/mixer worked just fine. Why they went on equipping the marine engines with that style transfer pipe I never did find out. There are at least three other surviving engines of the same model of the first engine.

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....with regard to his comments on icing in the mixer that was a common problem and it was solved early on by two simple fixes. First the typical mixer would have an approximately 6” long pipe nipple screwed into the inlet side to improve the “breathing” and a flexible metal pipe would be extended from an “Oven” around the exhaust pipe to offset the exothermic reaction from converting a liquid to a gas. Very early gasoline up until the case heading crude oil refining process came along about 1912/14 was much more volatile than later gasoline. The watermen considered the new gasoline not much better than kerosene. I have never had to add a heat pipe at shows but I do know the mixer valve can get very frosty on a hot summer day just idling at a show. I guess the bottom line is almost any carburetor would work on the early gasoline.

I have a copy of Stan first edition and quite honestly I don’t see any significant connection between it and this engine. I grant you the castings of the basic engine etc look like the drawings that were probably produced for the early assembly kits that Palmer Bros sold prior to 1900 for people looking to build their own engines. I have never seen one of those engines I should add. It may well be that this engine was connected up to city gas but it seems to me there would need to be some sort of rubber bellows that would equalize the pipe line pressure with the breathing of the engine. The photos you sent I also have and the linkage to the transfer port pipe are the clearly the same as on this engine.

To run on producer gas this set up conceivably could be used but I would want to study in real detail the brass “regulator and the control seen on the intake side of the engine. The rubber bellows would not be required but the gas producer would be an entirely separate set up. I would suggest the black oily drips would not be unrealistic if this engine was run for a long time on producer gas burning soft coal which was popular with blacksmiths for their forges.

I believe the patch on the cylinder is a repair nothing to do with the original manufacture.

I am very sorry Doug but I didn’t get your Palmer B in the 2005/6 annual listing of found Palmer engines. Will have to add it to the 2007 listing.

Regards, Dick

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