Building a Garden Tractor Out of Wood - Mounting the Engine

In my last post, I had just acquired an engine for my tractor, thanks to an old lawn mower that I managed to score to free.

Now that I had my engine, it was time to install it in my tractor.

I started the process by setting the engine on top of the tractor's chassis. The idea was to position the engine as close to the front of the tractor as possible.

However, as the plans had indicated that the engine was to be surrounded by a hood, including a front grill and a dashboard, I also needed to make sure that the engine was not too far ahead, which would prevent proper air circulation around the engine.

Building a Garden Tractor Out of Wood - Sourcing an Engine

Now that my garden tractor is now able to roll around on its own wheels, I really needed to get an engine sourced for it before I can go any further.

In the original 1941 magazine article, the tractor was powered by what was referred to as a "utility motor" with no further specification on what type of motor that it was, or what type of horsepower that it needed to have.

Looking at the diagram in the magazine, it appeared that the motor in question was the fairly typical small engine of that era that you would find in your finer lawn mowers and garden tillers.

With small engines, there are two basic configurations, regardless of how many cylinders or how much horsepower it may have. A small engine could be configured to have a horizontal drive shaft (ie, the engine provides power to drive things from the side of the engine) or a vertical drive shaft (power is being provided from the bottom of the engine).

Building a Garden Tractor Out of Wood Update - Getting Things Rolling

A few weeks back I embarked on building a small garden tractor based on plans that I had found in a copy of Mechanix Illustrated from 1941.  The unique thing about this tractor was that it was built completely out of wood. 

I managed to put together the chassis for the tractor, so the next step would be to attempt to put some wheels on to create a rolling chassis. 

Making Custom A/V Patch Cords - A Quick Project

Last weekend I was doing a bit of deep cleaning in the shed when I stumbled across a box of old VHS tapes.

Its been at least a good 20 years since I last played a VHS tape, so I was a bit mystified as to why I would be holding onto a box full of these things.  Since the intent was cleaning out the shed, these tapes now had a long-overdue date with the recycling bin.

But before I sent them on their way, I felt that it might not be a bad idea to at least take a quick look at the contents of the tapes. If there were some treasured memory stored on them, I should probably rescue them before they were permanently lost.