1969 Tecumseh H35 survivor

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#1
A while back I picked up a Ruttman Horny Toad along with a couple engines. One of the engines was an incomplete H30 and the other was a complete H35. While the Toad may be long gone, I still have the engines. I’ve been messing around with a bunch of H30’s getting the best parts to make a nice clean survivor engine for my current Toad “rustoration” project. I noticed as I was working on the one, I kept looking over at the H35 thinking “Man that thing is pretty clean”. Today I decided to take it to the car wash and wash the 53 year old dust off it. After I got it home I put some mineral spirits in the crankcase to flush out any nasties that have accumulated over the years. While I was draining the mineral spirits, I noticed writing on the bottom of the block, it was a date. The date read Apr241969, I knew it was a 69, the first digit of the serial number is “9” on the data plate. I also know that Tecumseh used the Julian date system for the manufactures production date. What came as kind of a surprise was the date of Apr241969 didn’t match the Julian date of 9125. 9 being the last digit of the year (1969) and 125 being the number of days in that year that it was produced. 125 days comes out to May 5th. I’m sure the blower housing is the one the engine was born with as finding one that was only two weeks apart from the date stamped on the bottom of the block would be slim to none. Maybe @markus could chime in to see if he’s ever ran across this anomaly or if it was the norm that the blocks were made one day and the date got stamped on the data plate as it was finalized?.

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