Hit & Miss engines

[waksupi]

I have had an interest in hit & miss engines for years. And, a friend has three, he says he will give me one of them. Anyone else ever had this hankering, and have you played with these? Do you put them to any useful purpose, or just enjoy listening and watching them go 'round?

[armoredman]

What is it?

[No_1]

I saw one set up to run a bunch of old ice cream machines. The ones that you crank the handle. He had a trailer that had 2 shafts that drove maybe 4 buckets on each shaft. All had pully/belt hook ups but the belts ran loose enough he could "jump" the belts off the pully to get the canister out of the buckets. Was a pretty neat set up and very cool to watch in action.

R,

[Bent Ramrod]

A friend had one going at our local doin's, Maturango Days, one year. It chugged, popped and idled away, twirled the governor and ran a little generator which was attached to an Edison-style light bulb. It got a lot of attention from passersby.

They're popular projects in magazines like "The Home Shop Machinist." You can get castings from vendors who advertise in the back.

Don't know what you'd use it for, unless you had an irrigation pump, hay baler or corn sheller that needed automating.

[Johnch]

We use one with a 5'- 6' flywheel to pump water in or out of a marsh and several feilds

Ours is started on gas and after it gets warm you switch over to K1

It has been in use for 80 years ( guess ) in the same spot
My grand father said his father in law bought it used

When I was a kid , I thought it was neat to ride the flywheel
If dad caught me , my backside got taned

John

[floodgate]

waksupi:

Get a copy of:

" 'Gas Engine Magazine'
This monthly magazine is your best source for tractor and stationary gas engine information. Every issue is filled with restoration stories, ...
www.gasenginemagazine.com/ " [from Google]

They have great articles, ads, suppliers, and schedules for meets, especially in the Midwest.

They are a lot more interesting when hooked up to a load, and a variable load (or a simple flywheel drag brake) will activate the "hit-'n'-miss" function. Our club is setting up to show our engines, tractors and a couple of truck restorations at the County Fair next month. My 1917 1/2-hp Fairbanks-Morse is almost ready to go, and should be able to handle the 12 inch by 8-foot wood lathe we put together. They can be a lot of fun, no more expensive than our other hobbies, and the people involved share the same kind of helpfulness and generosity as we see on "Cast Boolits".

Feel free to contact me by PM or e-mail for more info on the engine(s) you are looking at.

floodgate

[waksupi]

Floodgate, thank you for the offer, and I will keep it in mind, as I go forward with this.

Armoredman, do a Google search on Hit & Miss engines. Best I can explain it in short terms, an engine turned by initial firing, and revolutions continued with a flywheel, until revolutions drop to the point the cam locks into the flywheel, causing the engine to fire again, bringing the flywheel back up to operating speed. Very fuel efficient, but heavier than mom's pancakes!

[Frank46]

Floodgate, thank you for the offer, and I will keep it in mind, as I go forward with this.

Armoredman, do a Google search on Hit & Miss engines. Best I can explain it in short terms, an engine turned by initial firing, and revolutions continued with a flywheel, until revolutions drop to the point the cam locks into the flywheel, causing the engine to fire again, bringing the flywheel back up to operating speed. Very fuel efficient, but heavier than mom's pancakes!

Waksupi, try chaski.com they have a rather good listing for steam, gas, and other engines as well as a gunsmithing and machining forum. Hope this helps. Frank

[Bret4207]

I 2nd Gas Engine Magazine. Some of those old engines were works of art. Worse yet, I like STEAM!

[Gussy]

My brother has several. I gave him 2. One he has on a pump which just recycles the water in a barrel. Another is on an old drag saw.
Gus

[Ricochet]

I've played with these old gas engines for years. I don't actually have any hit and miss ones, mine are all throttle governed. I just like to watch 'em go around and listen to 'em chug, but I do sometimes run a generator, water pump, centrifugal blower to stir up a cooling breeze or some such.

Since 2000, my favorite engine's actually been one that's not truly antique, but is a modern reproduction of an old Lister Diesel engine, a single cylinder medium speed engine made in England from 1930 until the '80s. The Indians use a lot of these, and since foundries over there make a lot of replacement parts and there was still demand for them, so they started building replica engines, unlicensed. I got one of the second batch brought over by the first guy who imported some; he went through a lot of difficulties with our governmental agencies to do it. (When we were talking about these things on the Stationary Engine List back in the late '90s I coined the word "Listeroid" to describe them, a word that's been picked up by some of the later sellers of the things.)

In past years I liked to go up to the August show at the fairgrounds in Portland, Indiana, and I'd rig up little displays for the engine to run to entertain passersby. I had Ken and Barbie dolls hanging on in the side of a water tank "hot tub" with water circulated by an engine driven pump. That got in the Portland paper. I drove a generator powering a microwave and gave away bags of popcorn. Also cooked my own meals, had an electric fan cooling me while I picked my guitar under my tent, had a light when it got dark, and had a little refrigerator.

http://oldengine.org/members/culp/dolly.html

Haven't updated that particular page since about June of 2000, so the link to the seller is dead. Don't have a current one, but he lives in Rutherfordton, NC.

[Gussy]

Sitting out in my shed is an engine and generator. As near as I can tell from the 20's or 30's. It was used by a group of people in one of the local canyons for power before REA put lines in. They had a crude power grid and each house had one or two light bulbs. The engine was froze up when I dug it out of a friends junk pile and so far, it hasn't losened up. A couple of parts are misssing but I think it's repairable. I may get to it someday or let someone else have a go at.
Gus

[waksupi]

Pretty cool. I kind of have in mind an auto generator and battery bank, as a electric backup. Any idea of what horsepower I would be needing?

[floodgate]

Gussy:

Is that dragsaw one of those with the 4-cycle, single-cylinder Ottawas? HEAVY mutha'! I'm also working on a neat "Little Woodsman" saw, made and sold in 1946, using a beefed-up clone of a Maytag single. Their 5-hp was very light and compact (under 100 lbs), but would pull a 15' blade! You haven't really lived until you've seen one of these propped up and rigged for falling timber! Usually, they were confined to bucking-up down timber.

Waksupi, as a rule-of-thumb, figure one horsepower per 750 watts - then double it to give a good margin and ease the load on the engine. A 5- or 6-hp engine will run a household load easily, with a battery bank as a load-leveler. Gas engines designed for power generation duty usually had extra-heavy flywheels, to even out pulsations in the electric supply, especially for AC.

floodgate

[waksupi]

Floodgate, would pulsatiuon be evident, when running off of a battery bank? It wouldn't when just running off of the bank, I know, but would think an inverter would take care of this if the motor was running?

[Bret4207]

Try www.utterpower.com for info on Ricochets "Listeroids". I'd love to have one.

[JSH]

I have a friend that has actuall made his own from scratch. I was around thes when my dad was still alive at some of the old steam engine shows. I was always intrigued by them.
The fellow I mentioned before has enough parts to make a few more. I hope to make one for a winter project., LOL, don't have a clue what I would do with it, but what the heck. He uses the block on some B&S and also has some made from air compressor cylinders. Makes his own crank shafts and cams. He doesn't do computors or I would set you on to him.
Jeff

[grumpy one]

The Crossley single cylinder horizontal heavy oil engine we had to performance-test as first year engineering undergrads used hit-and-miss governing. It was a big brute - 18" stroke, about 8" bore, flywheel maybe 7 feet from memory. There was no crankcase - the crank and rod ran in the open air. All lubrication was by drip feed oilers - one of them riding on the connecting rod - and governed speed was 120 RPM as I recall. It was air-start, and to fill the compressed air tank you cut off the injection for a few revolutions and allowed cylinder compression pressure into the air tank.

Hit and miss governing used a simple fly-ball governor set up to be unstable - it toggled between up and down, to enable or disable injection for that revolution.

That engine must have been 50 years old when we tested it in about 1961. It had been tested quite a few times by then, but being in a heat-engines lab maintained by a couple of strange old guys who'd been there a long time, it looked and worked like new.

[floodgate]

Waksupi:

No, pulsation was only a problem, so far as I know, in direct-drive AC systems, and maybe in some DC set-ups; but this is just from reading - I'm not an electrical expert. The battery bank should even things out, and the DC-to-AC inverter should take care of frequency and waveform variations. Throtttle-governing would probably be preferable to "hit-'n'-miss" operation for electrical generation. Many of these engines were available in both systems, and the gas-to-kerosene switch-over was also often added to reduce operating cost - but all at the expense of more complexity.

Keep us posted, if you decide to go for it.

Some of the big engines run for pumping or electical generation on methane from municipal sewage treatment plants were said to have been run for months - even YEARS - without shutting down.

floodgate

[Buckshot]

...............Before the county put in a pipeline for irrigation water my great grandfather and a couple others had a big Fairbanks-Morse engine running a well to provide water for their orange groves. My grandfather said it would run for days at a time, boom ..............boom ....................boom ..................boom.

To start it you used a blank cartridge after walking the flywheel to position the piston. The engine set on 2 big cast iron I beams. The piston would come half out of the cylinder on a tray and there was a glass oiler with a wick hanging down to oil it. The crankpins and connecting rod also had glass oilers.

It ran the well pump via a wide leather belt. The exhaust pipe went over to a big drum and then a stack went up about 10 feet from that. He said the engine was bolted to a large concrete slab, and the slab would rock back and forth a bit as the engine ran. I never saw it and this was from his stories. He said they eventually replaced it with a 6 cylinder engine that ran on natural gas.

The pipeline came through sometime in the 1920's.

Not a hit-r-miss, but I always thought the engine on his spray rig was way cool. I don't know how old it was but I always remember seeing it. It was a 3 hp single cylinder from Montgomery Wards and it seemed as big as one of the smudge pots in the grove. It had a loose rope starter, a magneto ignition, a big glass fuel bowl under the updraft carb, and fuel pump. It was ALL cast iron. There was a lever on the side of the air fairing over the flywheel for a throttle. It was marked in half HP increases.

Not too long before my folks moved to Arizona some A**hole stole it. It turned a 8' shaft inside the spray tank with 4 agitator blades and the pressure pump at the same time. No doubt it would have turned a current 3 hp B&S inside out in a contest. I suppose they figure HP differently these days :-)

...............Buckshot

[grumpy one]

Now that the subject of oddball pumping engines has been introduced, consider the Humphrey pump. Fueled by explosive gas, it had no piston, connecting rod or crankshaft: the water being pumped was used as a piston. See diagrams and history:
http://www.steamengine.com.au/ic/history/humphrey_pumps/index.html

These were used for large-scale irrigation in Australia from 1922 to 1965, the last 35 years of which provided "trouble-free operation". On the other hand only 12 of these pumps were built world-wide, so you couldn't call them a raging commercial success.

I haven't seen one of the pumps, but they ran for so long with so little trouble in south-eastern Australia they were simply accepted as part of the environment, and a clever piece of invention. My father, an engineer prone to denigrating anybody's inventions but his own, saw them as a clever idea.

Geoff

[waksupi]

Clever!

[KCSO]

Waksupi
A friend of mine rebuilds these and shows and runs machinery with them at Fairs and such. We make most of the parts he needs on my lathe and milling machine. Since there isn't a whole lot of compression it isn't hard to ream the ridges and smooth up the cylinders and turn a new set of rings. I will check with Stan and see if he has any old supply catalogs to send you. These are a hoot to play with and I just got him a water pump to show off one of his smaller engines. Woof chuff chuff chuff woof My grandmother used one to wash clothes in a belt drive washing machine.

[Ricochet]

It turned a 8' shaft inside the spray tank with 4 agitator blades and the pressure pump at the same time. No doubt it would have turned a current 3 hp B&S inside out in a contest. I suppose they figure HP differently these days :-)
Not exactly, but... It's kinda like how a .45-70 and a .22-250 produce the same muzzle energy. Which do you take with you in grizzly country?

[waksupi]

We had one of the old kick start washer engines at the grandparents, and my older brother and I kicked on that thing for years, and never got a putt out of it. Probably should have checked for spark!

[Ricochet]

I have several of the little Maytag motors. They're pretty basic, but like anything else, you've got to know what to look for and fix. The real guru for these things is "Maytag Mark" Shulaw, who can also get you any part you need.

[3006guns]

I didn't expect to find my other hobby on this site! Between my brother in law and myself, we have about thirty or so...both throttle governed and hit and miss. Three years ago I drove from California to West Virginia to pick up a 6000lb oil field engine that I bought online. 6' flywheels...what a brute.
They are a hobby unto themself and have a dedicated bunch of followers If you've been to the Portland show you already know that!
I too have one of the Listeroids. It's mounted on an I beam base with heavy duty casters and is one heck of a deal in weight alone. You get your money's worth in iron when buying one!
The wife and I are planning a new house starting next spring (God willing and the loan/interest rate/housing markets straighten out) and a nice machine shop/gun room/casting/reloading room for me. Finally ALL my hobbies under one roof!:-D

[Old Ironsights]

Well, at least you can power an inverter to run your PC s you can stay online during a grid failure...

[waksupi]

I think I am just destined to fall into this eventually. I grew up in Iowa, and we used to go to Mount Pleasant on Labor day weekend. Billed as the world's largest steam show, and you could see most anything there, from the smallest of operating models, of engines of all types. The traffic would be backed up for miles, waiting to get in.
Biggest I remember, I believe was from a steam ship, with about a 17 foot pitmann on it. But, I seem to have an affinity to the old one lungers.

[PatMarlin]

I want a lister some day. My neighbor just gave me a big old Onan single cylinder diesel generator. I can't wait to get that thing running.

Ric- here's my power company, and I have direct to battery bank dc charging. 6 hp of the yanmar diesel puts out a solid 35 amps with a chevy alt, and only uses 3/4 of a gallon in 5-6 hours.

http://www.westcoastminisplitter.com/Solar.html

What's interesting about dc direct to the bank is I can run shop equipment off of my inverter system and there is nothing but pure power with no dips or start up surges with the dc running.

It's when I hook a big ac generator up to the inverter, and use the huge ac charger in the inverter that dips and surges happen. The dc is awesome... :drinks:

[grumpy one]

In my hobby farm days, which ended about 4 years ago, I had a Lister ST2 (15 hp two cylinder) direct-driving an 8.5 KVA alternator. I had an ex-forklift battery charger that converted the mains-voltage output from the alternator and put 115 amps into my 24 volt battery bank (a couple of tons of separate 2 volt cells salvaged from a mainframe Uninterruptible Power Supply). The Lister was supplemented by a pair of 80 watt solar panels on the roof as a trickle charge, to keep the battery from sulfating. The inverter supplied AC to the farm's power outlets when the Lister wasn't running. Unless I needed more power than the inverter could supply, I didn't run the Lister, for two reasons. First, the noise it made was appalling. (Air-cooled direct injection diesels radiate a lot of noise - none of it came from the exhaust, which used two stainless car mufflers in series, underground). The other reason to use the inverter was that diesel engines do not fare well at light load - they glaze the bores after just a couple of hundred hours and then suffer from blow-by and smoke. So, I'd run the battery down far enough so that the Lister could run for a couple of hours at 40% load driving the battery charge flat-out.

These environmentally-sensitive set-ups are fun - I built the whole thing myself - but a complete PITA compared with regular mains power. The problems are associated with keeping the battery healthy, which is just about a life's work on its own. When I sold the farm I just left the whole set-up in place rather than dismantle it, despite my wife's chagrin (she really liked that Lister).

[waksupi]

Since we have ventured sideways here.
Grumpy, you mention battery health. I know the basics, but would like to hear any details you have. The deep cell on my camper is dead, as it hadn't been used for quite a while. Use wise, I doubt there was 30 hours on it, and it doesn't seem to want to take a charge now. And, I am also concerned about the boat battery.
What do I need to do, for maximum battery life?

[Ricochet]

Yeah, I definitely consider mine a toy and wouldn't want to rely on it as a full time power source, though I'd be mighty happy for it in a power outage.

[PatMarlin]

I think I'm qualified to chime in here as it's been our only power source for 9 years.

First off, we do not miss a lick with this system compared to a grid system. It doesn't bother me to fire up a generator to run a welder as all of my other shop equipment is powered by the system. We have every appliance and shop tool known to man darn near.

Running a charging system periodically to supplement cloudy days is also not bother for us. Many times I run backup at night while we are asleep. This may be a bother for some folks.

Battery maintenance is a breeze if you set up your system and size it correctly to accommodate your needs. We have a 1 kilowatt, or a thousand watt system which is more than adequate for a couple.

First off, like us batteries like to be comfortable- in a sheltered, insulated space that does not freeze, or get hot in the summer.

You size your battery bank and system panels/wind generation/ or hydro power to where your not discharging the batteries over 50%. This insures long life. I've got 9 years on mine, and they still are in good shape.

I only have to add distilled water (about 4 gallons) 3 times a year. I spray non- flammable "liquid wrench" in the blue can on the terminals each time I refill, and they never corrode. It couldn't be easier to take care of these batteries.

I'm working on petrol free generation now so we will not have to rely on fuel. The forest has all the fuel we need, and will be supply energy soon for us.

My buddy down south is just now buying a system to add to his grid home, because the GOV rebates are near 50% of the system cost with installation, and his energy bills are going through the roof and rates increasing yearly. They have major power outages in peak heat seasons as well. This system will save him a pile cash on his costs, and he's going to take it with him when he moves to the hills.

You loose batteries when they are not continually charged in any rig as batteries discharge slowly whilst sitting. Add the freeze/heat factor and there done in short order. Best to park them in the garage and charge the periodically, then put them back in your rig as needed, and they will last a long time.

Ric- I bought my system from backwoods solar in Sand Point ID. They are the best in the business, and can help guide you with great info.

[Old Ironsights]

...Ric- I bought my system from backwoods solar in Sand Point ID. They are the best in the business, and can help guide you with great info.

Those are some good folks, aren't they?

[PatMarlin]

First class over the phone help to walk you through a problem no matter how long it takes... no kiddn'.. :drinks:

[Old Ironsights]

Sandpoint is great place to live too... as long as you've got work anyway. I used to deliver Pies from Spokane to Sandpoint. Liked Sandpoint waay better than Spokane.

[floodgate]

The Hit & Miss Enterprises catalog (free with an e-mail to <sales@hitnmiss.com>) is also a great source of both hardware and information. It is really incredible what-all they can supply in the way of used, new-old-stock and modern-made parts and manuals, even for my 1917 1-1/2 hp. F-M Z "Headless".

floodgate

[scrapcan]

Another thumbs up to Backwoods Solar. They have helped me immensely.

Also Sunelco in Victor, MT. http://www.sunelco.com/

The main topic of this thread I can't help with, but I find a fascination in the old engines both governor and hit and miss. What I would like to see is someone running one of the the old engines (or new for that matter) from a producer gas plant. The producer gas could be generated from slash/junk wood waste. Maybe even dried manure. I read a lot of stuff from the WWII era and use of producer gas in Europe and the us when under gas rationing.

Maybe some of the older members can share something on that topic also. My young generation you will be hard pressed to find two of us in anyone place that would know what you are talking about.

[grumpy one]

waksupi, care and feeding of lead-acid batteries is a big subject, but I can start with a few simple points and expand if you want. First, to keep a lead acid battery from sulfating it needs to be floated - held at a very precise, slightly elevated voltage. For a fully-charged 12 Volt non-calcium battery that is about 13-13.15 Volts. At lower voltage it slowly sulfates, and at higher voltages it disintegrates. Note that the battery will not charge at that voltage - it needs to be fully charged before floating. You can buy or make an automatic charger that will apply a suitable charging voltage - just over 14 Volts for a non-calcium, non-sealed type - until the current flow gets low enough to indicate full charge, then automatically drops the voltage to 13.1.

Because the battery is not always floated - sometimes it's in service - you need to apply additional measures to make its life almost indefinite. First, don't deep cycle it - even a deep cycle battery can only stand a few cycles. Second, recharge promptly after use. Third, don't overcharge - don't let the terminal voltage for a non-calcium, non-sealed type exceed 14.5 Volts (considerably lower maximums apply to either sealed or calcium types), and don't let the battery get warm during charging. The fourth thing is getting a bit more controversial and close to witchcraft: despite all of this the battery will slowly sulfate and removing the large crystals can only be done by semi-destructive equalization charging, or (and this is the witchcraft bit) use of pulse-charging and pulsing during float periods.

FWIW, my method was to do very little equalization, though I had to do some because of the initial condition of the cells when I bought them. I used a pulse-type charge regulator with the solar panels, and I used a high frequency pulsing device permanently connected to the battery. When I set it up there was some white sulfation visible (those big cells just about always are in transparent cases) after set up which included quite elaborate conditioning and equalizations. After the pulsing device was connected for about 18 months there was no longer any trace of white crystals visible, and the terminal voltage behavior was coming somewhat closer to what the textbooks said it should be for a healthy battery. However I am not endorsing the pulsing concept - I don't have nearly enough evidence to do that, and about two thirds of the technical material published by the people who make them is obvious nonsense. On the other hand I did discuss the issue with a scientist from a government research agency, whose personal specialization was in battery life issues. He indicated that the pulsing concept can remove sulfation from a structurally sound battery but it takes an extremely long time to do it. That matches my own experience with the time it took to lose the white stuff from my cell plates. Think years, not months, let alone the couple of days that the people who make the pulse devices claim. And, you can't recover a battery that has eroded plates. The plates are almost inevitably eroded if it has been kept in a discharged condition for a period of weeks or months - the sulfate crystals form inside the porous plates, and they occupy much more space than the plate crystals they replace, so the effect is the same as concrete cancer (rusting of reinforcement rods inside concrete) - they swell up and burst the plate material.

[Ricochet]

Somewhere around here I have a reprinted book from the early 1900s titled something like Gas, Gasoline and Oil Engines by a guy named Gardner Hiscox, I think, that contains a section in the back on building and operating producer gas generators. That's definitely not something I want to get into doing. But you can hunt up the book without too much trouble, it's still available.

[grumpy one]

manleyjt, "gas producers", which were clamped to the back bumper and also had a dolly wheel at the back, were commonly used here in Australia at around the time of WW II due to gasoline shortages. Here is a sort of blog from someone who is trying to revive the technology:
http://members.tripod.com/~highforest/woodgas/woodfired.html

My father used one of these things extensively way back before I was born, and it isn't all wine and roses. In particular, it emits tar along with the monoxide and hydrogen, and the tar clogs up and wears out the engine in a big way. Best not expect to run the engine for long periods unless you're happy to do some work and replace some parts, or work out a way to precipitate out the tar before it gets to the engine. The blog guy seems to have cooled the gas, but still didn't achieve any very remarkable durability judging by his log records.

[BeeMan]

The pulse type battery desulfator worked for me. I salvaged a 'dead' lawn & garden sized battery that would not take a charge. It returned to 85% of new capacity in about 3 weeks and gave another year of use. A couple other batteries that had plate erosion or shorts could not be recovered, so the pulsers are not a cure-all. I consider it another tool in the arsenal, for specific problems.

Amazing how casters have other interests in common. I too have been watching for small engine stuff for years. Someday...

[waksupi]

Excellent info guys. Please keep it coming. If I can't put it to use right away, maybe someone else will come across this topic in the future, and gain from it!

[PatMarlin]

This one has really got my attention...


http://www.greensteamengine.com/

[floodgate]

Lindsay Books <Lindsay Books - www.lindsaybks.com/prod/index.html> has the Hiscox book and a couple of others on producer gas systems.

floodgate

[corvette8n]

Sit there and watch it run[smilie=1:
I used to subscribe to GEM magazine don't even know if thay are still around
Like any other hobby the fun is in the collecting.
I went to a car show last year and they had the biggest hit & miss I ever saw, the thing was as big as a steam engine, guy said it came from a hospital used to power big generator. He had it mounted on a construction trailer and it shore did shake when it was running.

[Ricochet]

GEM's still around, but as with guns, most of the action's gone online...

[scrapcan]

grumpy one,

I have heard exctly what you have said about the tar and heavy alophatic oils that can cause problems. I have an uncle who said they built one and they purged the gas through a condenser coil and then let it bubble through water to clean up soem of the trash. Seems to me that with a little ingenuity the producer gas could be an intersting sideline in the topic at hand.

I will take a look at the blog and see what is happening.

This is why I like this site. Cast boolits and info on about any other topic will be passed on if you ask.

[waksupi]

Son of a gun. i was looking through the local shopper, and found an ad, for a snowblower engine, and a Lister diesel engine, in parts for sale.
I went and took a look. The Lister is an old English manufacture, and the piston had been seized. The guy damaged the piston getting it loose, and the cylinder is scored. After some haggling, I got it for $50.
So, I have something to play with, and hopefully can either get it rebored and sleeved, or find a new cylinder and piston.
I'm off!

[TAWILDCATT]

I am not sure but when I was in calif.I saw the rocking beam oil wells and I believe the motor to run them was hit and miss.--:coffee: --:Fire: --[smilie=1:

[Ricochet]

Ric, you got a deal on that old Lister!

The oil field engines aren't generally hit and miss by design, though they often miss or backfire in operation.

I have a little Fairbanks-Morse ZC 52 that came off an oil well near Carmi, Illinois. Ran one of those walking beam pumps. It's as small as an oilfield engine comes.