MTFCA Forum

Spent half the day yesterday making these. Kingston 5 ball for a 1909. Like most of them, the caps have been in and out a zillion times, removed with everything from a correct sized wrench to a chisel and hammer, pliers, who knows what.

Since they are NOT the same as the later 4 ball caps which are not all that hard to find, the only answer I know of is to machine the nasty part of the cap off, make a new cap and solder it on to the old base. Not as hard as one might think but like all of this -- time consuming. They all have to be exactly the same height, same taper, same etc. These are not totally done, they still need a little more polishing but this is the difference between soaking them in carb cleaner, blowing them out and wiping them off with an oily rag and restoration. Restoration takes time and patience.

If you have a five ball and it doesn't run well, take the caps out and look at them. Shallow cup caps from a 4 ball will not allow the balls to raise far enough to flow enough air to run well under load. It will start and idle but the 4 ball balls are larger and heavier and the caps are different.

I'm just running a lowly, standard NH on my equally lowly 24 Touring, but wow....I do enjoy looking at your handiwork Stan.

What you do is partly art.

I would add fabulous! I' m aware, Stan do not have any one who could replace him in a near future if he decided to stop doing carb restoration like this one. But by now, I really enjoyed his art.

Stan...I'm 51 and I plan on selling my interest in my oil refinery service company in about 5 - 7 years and I'm looking for something I can run out of my home shop. Something to keep me busy and make some spending money.

Not sure if you'd be wanting to step away from things around that point. If you are, I might be interested in talking to you.

I won't be doing this in five or six years. I'm trying to get all the work that is setting on the shelves done and sell off my inventory, I have too many irons in the fire and not near enough heat anymore. I am not taking in any more repair work to be returned in 2020, we'll see how it goes over the winter.

It's more work than people usually think, time consuming and a lot of it is piddly, piddly, piddly. I just spent about two hours taking the five ball float plunger apart and cleaning it, making a new part for it, putting it back together and putting it back on a right hand drive Kingston 5 ball going to Australia. Nobody would have ever noticed that the plunger shaft was pock marked from being pulled back with a pair of pliers some time in the last 110 years but I would have known it.

+ I'm pushing 80. Couple years.

Stan, have you determined any significance on the serial numbers on the early Kingston 5 balls? I suspect they were used on other makes of cars as well.

There are dozens of different models and at least 12 sizes of 5 balls. They were used on a lot of different engined and applications.
I don't see any significance in the serial numbers.