Old House Handyman: Maintaining equipment around the house is vital
I needed an angry farmer.
That’s what a friend from church told me after I described a very stuck piston in an old motorcycle that Daughter No. 3 and I are working to restore.
“I need a what?” I asked my friend.
“You need a can of Angry Farmer,” he said.
“It’s the best penetrating oil I’ve ever found. It’s made by a guy just up the road in Martinsburg.”
I had tried many other products — WD-40, which is ubiquitous around our house and farm, and a few others my dad swears by.
I poured in Marvel Mystery Oil and let it sit for weeks. Yes, the red “mystery oil” is a thing that has been around since the 1920s, and I have had great success with it.
But the stubborn piston wasn’t showing any signs of giving up its frozen position in the cylinder.
So I went to a nearby parts store, where I was greeted by a tall young man with a booming voice, “Hey, bud, what can I help you with?”
“I’m looking for an Angry Farmer,” I said.
The place fell silent for a minute and the other three or four guys behind the counter looked my way.
“We’ve got a lot of them around here,” one of them said in a gruff voice, slowly breaking a smile.
I told them I would be joining the angry crowd if I couldn’t get the reluctant piston to start moving.
They spoke highly of the product from nearby Knox County, so I bought a can and sprayed its contents liberally on the 1972 Husqvarna we’re restoring. (The Angry Farmer website lists where its products are sold, including at some central Ohio auto-parts and hardware stores.)
You might be wondering what all of this has to do with old houses and other buildings.
Protecting your tools and equipment
Here’s the connection: Keeping tools and equipment in good working order is an important part of maintaining your home, farm or business — especially if you do any of that maintenance yourself.
Nothing is more frustrating than running for that thing you know you need — a tool, machine or vehicle — only to find that it’s broken or otherwise not working.
So the first rule of thumb is to maintain them well. Oil and grease your tools. Keep them in a protected, dry environment. Put them back in the same place you found them after using them. And do the regular maintenance on all motorized tools and equipment.
On a farm, maintaining small-engine-driven tools alone can be a full-time job. We have generators for when the power goes out, because the only way we get water from the well is to start up a generator. And we have tools with small engines and motors that all need regular attention.
Then, there are the larger machines — tractor and implements, mowers, motorcycles and a couple of snowmobiles.
Some are used more than others, and that brings me back to stuck pistons. The motorcycle we’re restoring now is the fourth that my daughter and I have tackled in the past five years.
All had been sitting so long that they were no longer running, and we’ve decided that should not be happening.
The first is a 78-year-old bike that was my dad’s when he was a teenager. He kept it all these years but had stopped riding it years ago when he switched to more agile, modern bikes in the 1970s. But it’s a very special bike to us, for sentimental reasons, and it’s not going anywhere — except for occasional outings on back roads.
We still had a few of the motorcycles that Dad and I rode in the 1970s. My daughter and I fixed up and sold one two years ago. This past year, we brought another back to life, and we plan to sell it.
Now, we’re working on another sentimental favorite. It belonged to a good friend of my dad, who, when he passed, his children gave the bike to my dad. We will pour lots of love into it this year.
Along with more Angry Farmer and Marvel Mystery Oil.
Like opening a pickle jar
I’m a true believer in the mystery oil. I have no idea what’s in it, but I poured it into the cylinder of one of those old motorcycles decades ago, and even after sitting in the barn for 20 years, it fired up after some carburetor work.
And I poured a whole bottle of Marvel into the cylinders of a snowmobile that had been seized by a little rust two years ago. Every time my daughter or I passed that beast in the barn, we’d give a tug on the starter rope.
Nothing.
So we asked a mechanic neighbor to take a look at it. He had it a week or so — during which we received the best snow of the winter — and returned it in running order.
I asked how he did it, expecting a long description of tearing apart the engine.
“I just pulled on the rope, and it turned over,” he said. “There was a lot of oil in there. Did you know that?”
I sighed, smiled and asked him if he’d ever tried opening a pickle jar, only to hand it to someone else in frustration — and then watch them effortlessly pop it open.
He laughed as I continued.
“I tried opening that pickle jar for two years — even poured a whole bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil into it,” I said. “Then I handed it to you, and you opened it.”
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers: youroldhouse1@gmail.com