Gravity

Someone told us how our neighbor in the city earned his nickname and it had something to do with him getting shocked when he was holding a spark plug while someone else started a car. Sparky owned the Shell station on Hudson Avenue in the Polish section back in the 60’s. We have some stories about him. I could have used his help the last few days.

With nine days of full sun and moderate temperatures ahead of us we were all geared up to split the piles of wood we have from the fallen oaks this spring. I changed the oil in the Heathkit splitter that belonged to a small group of neighbors until they all stopped burning wood. It started right up and I was going great guns for about ten minutes until it ran out of gas. I filled the tank and it wouldn’t start.

I took the spark plug out and cleaned it but it still wouldn’t start. Peggi got the manual out and we went to the trouble shooting section. After the spark plug there as a small section on the right gasoline and then complicated instructions on cleaning the carburetor.

I bought a new spark. plug at Titus Mower and picked up a can of carburetor cleaner. They told me bad gas is a common problem when a small engine won’t start. I put in the new plug and pulled my guts out but it still wouldn’t start so I bought a couple of gallons of Ethanol-Free gas at Herrema’s.

Peggi and I spent about an hour trying discussing ways to get the old gas out of the tank and then I remembered my brother Fran siphoning gas when we were growing up so I gave him a call. It was noon and he had just sat down for lunch but he said he would stop over.

He came with a short hose and stuck it down in the tank and then sucked on the other end. He got a small taste of gas and spit it out but the tank was empty in a minute. He told me he and his friends used to siphon high-test gas out of the school buses at night, back when gas was thirty cents a gallon.

The splitter started right up with the new gasoline.

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