I forgot where you live?
Ya OTC Onan engines are not that common outside of cheap gasoline land Canada and America…
Clones are Cheap!
The Chinese did the world a favour there they made owning a water pump, generator or any one many other applications for a reliable small engine easy and within reach for everyone.
I just wish they had built them with a longer rod to stroke ratio so they could run at lower RPM a bit better.
You say cheap but things are getting ugly fast, took this picture today. The price I pay for the good stuff…
Regular gasoline here is 1.90 a litre.
Thats 6 bucks a Canadian gallon for 87 octane
All the more reason I should have built a charcoal truck years ago.
But thats what a lot of people pay ever normal day of the week…
By the strictest numbers Inflation has made a dollar today is worth less than 1 / 7.25 of it was since 1970.
So… .36 an imperial gallon in 1970, and 8.65 cents today adjust for inflation. $ 1.20 in 1970 dollars?
Highest its ever been is 3 times the price when it was about the cheapest?
Number don’t jive.
Must be a US dollar or US gallon or both mixed in there someplace…
Small price to pay for mobility.
Still cheaper than owning a horse.
Yup wait until it hits $7.00. In 2008-2009 When it got up to $6.00 the stock market started to crash. Hang on for the ride. I am glad I invested my monies well on a wood burner truck. What Wayne said years ago when he was first being interviewed about DOW could happen. The people of the USA could be brought down to it’s knees in very high fuel prices across the board.
Start building while you can drive on wood members.
In the near future a wood burner vehicle might sale for more then a home. If some offered me $300,000.00 for my truck I might think about … nah… I need to finish my Jeep and Subrau first.
Bob
Trust me Bob I am frantically trying to find fire tube material for the next one
Look up any well drilling operations. They will have scrap 12" .
Bob
People who install billboards often have 12" pipe drops they don’t use. Or you might check sign companies in general.
Gasoline is hitting $9/gallon, diesel $8. That is why I invested in a new used motor for my broken Vito. I am not going to buy a new car/van with this fuel prices unless it is electric. No van available. Took the Model3 last week for delivery (alternative was a Vito 3l v6 from the car shop). Grazy, call Elon Musk a moran, but he changed the automotive. Only a Model X is alowed to tow two ton! Apart from the expense, I cant go to clients like that. Let them think I am stupid in my old Vito and I can do my thing without criticism.
Well Wallace,
I am still waiting for a set of four brush spring holders… I doubt I will ever receive them. “Unavailable”. The ground has shifted, and as good as the Onan is…it’s scrap because it cannot be maintained anymore. So I am looking for good Honda clone generators now.
Go on smokestak.com
Onan Generators | Smokstak® Antique Engine Community
Onan section there are suppliers and collectors there that can get parts.
These guys know where the parts are.
They are common and easy to get but most shops rather sell you a generator than a part
Thank you this a great help. I have a 1976 4.0 Onan generator in my motor home. It has been running great for all these years. Now I know where I can get parts if needed.
Bob
Probably a BFA.
You can put the heads off a BGE on that and improve the fuel economy a little.
A very good unit.
I’d be surprised if someone didn’t fab those. That isn’t an extremely hard die. I wonder if you can make one with abs plastic. (The tangent is I was seeing jewelry metal stamping was using abs plastic for forming dies for copper and aluminum sheet.)
The wholesale gas spot prices I think in the NY market was 3.52. And E85 was 2.22 yesterday. GasBuddy is anticipating prices to go up another 50c in the US.
I would HIGHLY recommend everyone in the US (at least) to encourage people to use E85 if they can. It is cheaper but there aren’t very many stations outside the midwest. But even a 2% overall gasoline reduction will help overall prices.
https://www.e85vehicles.com/
(and yes converting them to woodgas would be better, but I don’t see a lot of people willing to take -that- step quite yet.)
I’d love to but unfortunately my 2011 GMC 4.3l powered truck won’t take E85 kits. Must be the spider injectors not playing nice.
It is probably part of it. Not everyone can use it, and then they also have to be within range of the e85 station. But it is worth a shot to ask people to check. One of my friends from HS was complaining about gas, and well her particular model can use E85. She actually forgot, because I had pointed that out to her when she got it a couple of years ago… 
One thing that’s weird is the kits those E85 sites sell don’t offer one for my 98 Buick Century, yet they offer them for the 98 Chevy Lumina, same 3100 V6.
They offer them for the 3.8l buick engines that year. I would email them and ask. It might be the injectors. I can’t imagine there is a huge difference between the two engines, but I don’t know what those differences are.
3100 Chev came from the 2.8l, the Buick 3.8 is a different engine and casting that shares no parts. 4.3 was small block with two cylinders removed, also different from the others.
A very stout engine is the inline 4 used by Volvo, some were turbo charged. ( called a red block )
All had thick blocks strong bearings and were used in marine applications with almost no changes.
If you gum up the valves with tar and snap a timing belt no problem you will not wreck the engine because its design not to contact the valves if the belt breaks.
Volvo made some earlier engines with high compression for marine use that were absolutely magnificent machines but the end of premium leaded gas means they are rare to find.
A Ford or Pinto engine OHC also is free wheeling if you break the belt.
Not a great engine but simple and easy to work on.
A LIMA ford engine is better but hard to come by because its industrial.
All can be turbo charged pretty easy
I know realize I am out in the rhubarb again you guys are talking about E85.
Not wood gas turbo engines.
I’m just rambling…
E85 I never can wrap my head around the idea of burning food.
The worlds bread baskets are on fire in Ukraine and Russia.
I expect there will be grain shortages in the near future and all that corn might be needed for food in some desperate countries…
Thank God for the US farmer…
He sure feeds a lot of people when its a crisis.
It actually developed in part because there wasn’t a market for US grains. US grains were literally banned or limited in 185 countries. The alternative is the government price support program, which at one point literally bought grains at the subsistence price and landfilled it because there just wasn’t enough buyers.
By making Ethanol, the distillers grains are NOT limited because they can be exported as an animal feed supplement because it is processed. Only 20-25% of corn is the carbs and sugars they use for making ethanol, so 75% is left.
The whole food for fuel as near as I can tell originated in Europe because they don’t have enough acreage to copy what we do and want to remain compatible with our system so they can sell us their overpriced cars.
We don’t have enough ethanol production to meet all of our demand, but it literally costs us nothing. We could spend 35b every year for price support/farmer bailouts, or invest 35b in manufacturing and create a market for it, and really it is part of our price protection mechanism because we don’t control the price of oil and the market is way too easy to corner. Even curbing 5% of use with e85 takes the sting out of the price.
The new way is electrified vehicles, but there just isn’t enough battery production right now, and really we need a lot more home solar as well. And the Tesla mafia attacked hybrids so hard that they didn’t sell enough of them.
It isn’t all about emissions, a large part of it has to do with protecting our economy from these price spikes. We aren’t quite there yet, but we are a heckuva lot more technologically advanced and further then we were in 2006 the last time prices spiked.
The world’s bread basket has shifted. Russia/Ukraine still does a lot of production, but australia and Brazil are major producers of things like soybeans and I believe corn now.
