I remember my parents talking about hand cranking those old cars { mostly model A’s & T’s } & saying you had to be careful or it could kick back & maybe break an arm . Mother laughed many times about Dad hand cranking a Hupmobile { sp } they once owned in cold weather . Dad swore he cranked that thing until the water boiled in the radiator & it never hit a lick .
Guys who ride old Harleys (I’m one of them) can testify about kicking back. Originally, the Harleys have their throttle twist grip on the right like most bikes. The left side also has a twist grip on the stock bars and that cable retards the distributor for starting.
Over the years many bikes were modified and the distributor retard was eliminated. This often led to the engine kicking back while starting and could be mildly painful or rolling on the ground painful.
One old Sportster I owned had a modified engine with 12.5 to one compression, hot cam, and a magneto with no retard.
That thing would kick back hard enough to have me in tears.
One day after riding the bike to lunch it got cantankerous about starting and kicked back very hard on me. It kicked hard enough that it split the sole on my right boot clean into and had me limping for 3 or 4 days with a bad bruise on the bottom of the foot after the tears stopped.
The magneto could be locked down in retard and while it would start easier it would run like garbage. Lock it in the advance position and it ran like greased lightning but caused a lot of cursing and moaning while trying to start it.
There’s an old joke about “Sportster Knee” and bikes like that are the source of it…
No, I’m actually talking about horizontally opposed 4 and 6 cylinder engines. In my case, Lycoming IO-360C1E6 and L IO360C1E6 (1972 Piper Seneca, twin engine). The cylinders are bolted to the engine. It’s not unusual for an A&P to take a cylinder off and replace it, if it’s found to be cracked, or otherwise suffering from low compression.
My stepfather had a model A he bought to commute for work when I was 12 tears old and I hated that car. He got it very cheap because the starter was bad. When at work he parked on a hill and roll started it but at home it was flat ground and I was the starter. I was already 6’ tall and 200lb but it was still a nasty chore.
Ever tried to hand crank start a diesel tractor? Now that’s fun. As a young boy of 15 or so I could barely get a quarter turn on the crank. I had an uncle who could get 3 full revolutions on that old McCormick-Deering.
Yanking the pull rope on my weed-eater & chain-saw is all the hand cranking I care to do . When I was a kid my dad had an old super A international farm tractor . It was rarely used but I remember it having a hole in the bottom of the grill & a hand crank clipped on there somewhere . It did have a battery & a starter but would rarely start off them . It was parked against a bank & would fire right up when coast started .
If I remember correctly it had a magneto or some such instead of points & the battery & starter would crank it but it wouldn’t hit & fire up . Start right up by coasting though . I don’t remember anyone ever hand cranking it so don’t know if it would have started that way or not .
My son recently told me a story about a prof, during his medical school training, saying that the type of broken hand where the thumb is pulled away from the hand is called a chauffeur’s break. He said he had no idea why it was called by that term. My son was able to explain that it’s because the break was caused by hand cranking an engine with the driver’s hand closed with the thumb over the crank instead of on the same side as the four fingers. When the crank kicks back due to an advanced spark lever, the thumb takes the punishment instead of letting the hand crank loose from the driver’s hand. The prof was surprised that a 20 something student would know such a thing in this day and age. My son recalled me hand cranking my Model A Truck when the battery got too low to crank it when he and I were using it to haul some logs. I carefully explained the technique to him as I demonstrated it. That was only about 13 years ago.
I find it absolutely amazing that you was using a model A truck to haul logs 13 years ago .
You would have liked our ex-town mayor. He never owned a car and covered countless thousands of miles a year on a BMW motorcycle.
He routinely pulled a 14 foot flatbed trailer and when he built his cycle shop he did the entire interior up in rough wood beams. He hauled those beams from Arkansas on that trailer which was pulled by his BMW.
My understanding is that the rig often weighed out about 3500 pounds gross weight as measured by the scales at the grain elevator here.
Of course the bad news would have been if he ever lost the bike and had a ton of 6 X 6s come flying at him.
@Slowpoke You mentioned your parents talking about hand cranking cars, my dad did not like Fords and never owned one. His complaint was that you had to crank them quite a bit to get them go fire up in cold weather. I didn’t see what the big deal waa,in spinnng the starter motor just a little longer until I got to the bottom of the story. My dad had gone to a dance at the college he attended and had driven to the dance with his date in the Model T Ford his parents owned. The Model T did not have the optional electric starter. While the dance was going on, the temperature outside really dropped. When the dance was over my dad cranked and cranked to fire up that Model T. Before it finally started up, his date left with someone else. After my dad told me this incident, I said “Look on the bright side. If that Ford had started right up, you might have gotten serious about your date, not met mom and I wouldn’t be here”. My,dad replied, " That is,what I have against Fords".
Triedaq left the computer on so I’ll just add that probably readers of this board wish that Model T had started right off–Mrs. Triedaq.
LOL , that was good for a chuckle . My dad was a Ford man , he must not have bought one until they had starters & started easier .
I do remember the 1939 Chevrolet my dad owned when I was in grade school. That Chevrolet had an emergency hand crank and I saw my dad hand crank the car to start it on several occasions when the battery was too low to run the starter. When he traded the Chevrolet for a used 1947 Dodge, I couldn’t understand how the Dodge could be started in cold weather. There was no hand choke and no emergency crank if the battery was dead.
Don’t know why but that post reminded me of my wife and I taking a small neighbor girl with us to my mothers . Mother mentioned she could remember not having electricity as a small child . The little girls face got all screwed up & you could tell the wheels were turning . She finally said , where did you plug in your computer ?
I understand that the term “cranky” comes from the old hand crank days and having to deal with the kick back and such. I once had a push mower where the blade bolt had started to back out and there was an odd vibration. It was an old junker so just figured it was the rod knocking and was about to come apart so I just kept mowing. Anyway, I had to stop to empty the bag or such and when I went to restart, the blade was essentially spinning free from the crankshaft. It went POP and backfired with all its might, kicking the starter rope handle back into my left hand which was on the handle to keep the mower running. I thought it must have shattered the bones in the back of my hand but luckily it didn’t. It much have busted every blood vessel as my hand blew up like a balloon and was about 3x the normal size. It healed up but I used Loctite on that blade bolt from then on. The blade acts as part of the flywheel on a push mower so when it isn’t properly attached, you can get really bad kickbacks.
I also had a set of Poulan lawn equipement. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was just the cheap junk and maybe one step above bottom of the line. It was yellow in color while I know the really lousy stuff is green or purple. It was a matched set of a trimmer, blower, and a chainsaw. None of it was worth a crap. I decided to pronounce it “Pull On” as all I ever did was pull on the starter rope. It was the type of equipment where you spent more time tinkering with it to get it to start than you did actually using it. The string feed on the trimmer was such a pain you had to keep manually feeding the thing every couple minutes.
Finally one day I was using the trimmer and it was really hot outside. I mean like over 100 F. After I was done I went to shut it off and then it took off. It just went faster and faster and then there was a loud POP and the entire thing just ground to a halt. It decided to start dieseling and I figured it just threw a rod. There was a simple little cover on the back of the crankcase so I pulled it off expecting to find the wreckage of what used to be the piston and connecting rod. Everything looked perfect. I figured out that the flywheel key had sheared. Obviously the thing fired out of sequence and tried to reverse itself in direction while it was spinning at a high speed, shearing the key. Anyway, I looked into buying a new key and found out it was integral to the flywheel so would have to replace that. The part cost more than I paid for the unit and I had grown to hate it so out to the curb it went. I thought this was cheap design but I guess shearing the key in a flywheel on a trimmer isn’t the most common thing.
Then the blower just got to be more of a pain until I gave it away to someone who did a ton of work on it and he is still using it. I think he spent more on parts fixing it than it was worth but it now works. I don’t remember where the chain saw ended up but I no longer own it. All 3 of these were “Pull On” branded for sure!
Then there was some other used chain saw I once had. When you pulled the rope it would start in the wrong direction about half the time. You would just turn it off and restart it until it spun in the correct direction. I guess some two stroke engines can be started in the wrong direction. It ran just fine except the chain was going the wrong way. I have only seen this happen with this one chainsaw. Anyone else ever seen this?
Two things you mentioned caught my attention . First , I have a riding mower sitting under plastic waiting for a ride to the dump . I was using it & all of a sudden the engine started running faster & faster until it finally made a racket & died . Now I wonder if the key sheared in it .
Second , I once had a 2 cycle motorcycle that I could put in gear & coast backwards & start . I don’t guess the engine was running backwards though because when I let the clutch out it ran forward . I always thought that was weird .
The riding mower might have kicked back and sheared the key, thrown a rod, or ate a valve. See if the thing has any compression when you turn it over. Also pull the spark plug and see if it is damaged. If it ate a valve or threw a rod you probably won’t want to mess it it. The recycle yard is where it goes.
Did you roll start the motorcycle with the transmission in reverse? This may sound stupid but I have never really had anything to do with motorcycles. Do they even have a reverse? I know I would enjoy one but also know I would probably end up killing myself or more likely, someone else would end up killing me. The drivers on the road are getting worse by the day and I blame idiots on phones or texting for a lot of it. I can’t go more than a few days without a near miss on the road.
Anyway, if there is no reverse speed, you are likely starting it much the way that chainsaw I had started. The odd thing was that it would start in the correct direction about half the time and the wrong direction the other half. Something had gone wrong with the starter mechanism inside the housing and it had been rigged so this had something to do with this.
I bought that riding mower new & used it hard for about 10 years . I figured it didn’t owe me anything so I bought another one .
The motorcycle didn’t have a reverse gear . It does seem really strange that I could start it that way & not have the engine running backwards . I wouldn’t have thought it would even run backwards but obviously your 2 cycle saw did . Darn if I can explain it .
I remember a two stroke outboard motor that I think was a Neptune made sometime in the 1930s. The motor could run in either direction depending on which way the starter rope was wrapped around the flywheel. The idea was to start the motor to back the boat away from the dock, stop the motor, wind the rope to start the motor in the other direction and take off. However, if one worked the throttle just right, one could stop the engine, then just as the engine kicked back, open the throttle for the other direction and the engine rotation would be reversed without having to stop and restart the motor.
My dad bought a little 2.5 hp Montgomery Ward SeaKing motor in the mid 1950s for $12. The motor was made sometime before WW II. My dad challenged my brother and me to make it run. We cleaned the carburetor, put in a new spark plug and it started right up. The engine didn’t have a choke. There was a little pin like button on the bottom of the carburetor. Pushing on the button raised the carburetor float. To start a cold engine, the button was pushed up and held until gasoline dripped on your finger. When the starter rope was pulled, a richer mixture was sucked into the cylinder which helped the engine start quickly. I am sure the EPA would have no qualms approving this cold start system today.
There was a little pin like button on the bottom of the carburetor.
The British called this a “tickler”…had 'em on my 1975 Norton 850.
I heard that was a french invention 