For any collector of strange old gas engines, the 1982 auction at Greenfield Village was not to be missed. Ed Rowland, a collector of strange old gas engines, missed it. But nearly 40 years later, he’s tracked down both of the experimental Ford engines he wanted to buy at that sale, one of them a prototype opposed-piston engine and an even stranger one that defies brief description.
“I missed it, but I knew where those two engines went,” Ed said.
For any collector of strange old gas engines, the 1982 auction at Greenfield Village was not to be missed. Ed Rowland, a collector of strange old gas engines, missed it. But nearly 40 years later, he’s tracked down both of the experimental Ford engines he wanted to buy at that sale, one of them a prototype opposed-piston engine and an even stranger one that defies brief description.
“I missed it, but I knew where those two engines went,” Ed said.
What’s more, Ed intends to not only display them in the museum that he and his son run in Ohio, but also start and run the opposed-piston engine, their most recent acquisition, for the first time in decades.
Ed, a retired machine repair technician for Timken, said his interest in antique gas engines started in 1971 when a nearby farmer nearly scrapped one. “It just caught my fancy,” he said. “So we saved it.” With a whole shop full of lathes and machining tools at his disposal, Ed set about getting that engine to run. It then led to other engines as well as a network of old gas engine enthusiasts and some rather unusual and unique examples of turn-of-the-century engineering.
“If somebody’s not interested in an engine or it’s too tough for them, they send it along to me,” he said. “So we ended up with quite a lot of oddball stuff.” That includes a handful of patent models as well as several experimental engines built to test out new theories on internal combustion. “It was the latest technology at the time, so everybody had their own idea,” Ed said. “Some of the contraptions people come up with were fascinating – a lot of unique ways to get around patents.”
So Ed should have been in attendance at the Greenfield Village auction, where dozens of Ford-built experimental engines crossed the block as part of an effort to shore up the finances of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Among those engines were some, if not all of the experimental Ford engines discovered in a Greenfield Village sugar beet mill building that Special Interest Autos cataloged in 1973 – including at least one of the air-cooled Ford X-8 engines.
Ed and his son Nick had their eyes on two of those engines in particular. The one with the number 21 painted on it was one of two opposed-piston engines found in the sugar beet mill. In it, four pistons ran in two cylinders and turned two crankshafts, one at either end of the engine. With a 3-1/2-inch bore and a 3-15/16-inch stroke, it came to a total of 76 cubic inches: smaller than the massive opposed-piston engine design that Ford proposed for an airplane, but Nick said he believes it was still meant for an autogyro.
“I would’ve hated to be the machinist on it,” Ed said.
The Ford experimental rotary/toroidal engine.
The other engine the Rowlands had their eyes on – either engine number 5 or engine number 46 in the sugar beet mill hoard – can best be described as a rotary, but shares no traits with the Wankel-style rotaries. Instead, it has a piston that travels through a 2-1/8-inch diameter torus and slides past a precombustion and post-combustion chamber, both of which are linked via poppet valves (and work in concert with the piston and a rack-and-pinion-activated sliding valve in the torus) to create a compressed charge. Technically, it’s a one-stroke, one-cylinder, two-cycle engine with a stroke that measures 29-3/4 inches.
“It’s pretty unique, but I don’t know how they machined it,” Ed said. “If something ever broke and the piston comes around, it’d make a big bang.”
While Ed acknowledged that the rest of the sugar beet mill engines had unique designs, many of them were basic derivatives of existing engines, so he and Nick weren’t really after anything but these two engines. Even these two engines, he admits, weren’t real practical.
“The main problem with them was that they were too complex, they’d lose so much power,” he said. “They were a little too off the wall. You have to wonder why they even built the engines because you can just look at it and say that it won’t work. They definitely would not have made it to production (knowing what we know now), but at the time, who knows?”
Still, they captured Ed’s interest, and after 20 years or so, he managed to buy the rotary/toroidal engine. Then earlier this year he and Nick bought the opposed-piston engine out of the estate of the collector who bought it from Greenfield Village. Both engines remained in roughly the same condition as when they were sold in 1982, and through some forensic disassembly, Ed and Nick determined that both did run at some point based on the carbon buildup in the cylinders