06-25-2017, 01:53 PM
(06-25-2017, 01:08 PM)LongRanger_imp Wrote: I had a 3 hp Briggs and Stratton minibike when I was ten. The bike ate #35 master links for lunch and it was all I could do to save enough allowance to buy replacements ($1.05 at the motorbike shop down the hill). Mom had to drive me so it was always a big production. She wasn't keen on me having a minibike in the first place.
Anyway, one day I'm at the small engine repair shop with my dad and sitting on the counter is a rack of authentic Briggs and Stratton 30W oil. I had never seen such a thing. $2.40 a quart if I recall, which was a lot of money for a ten year old kid back in 1970. Naturally, I had to have some.
So I bought a can, got home, pushed my minibike out to the curb, drained the crankcase in the gutter, and proceeded to refill it with the authentic nectar from the Mother Company. It was all good until I realized that I forgot to reinstall the drain plug. Lesson learned! From that day forward, I've never made that same mistake. Nor have I ever drained oil in the gutter again!
I'll bet a lot of us have stories like that. When I was a teenager, my dad took a rectangular tin can, probably about 6 quarts, cut out one side of it out and rolled over the edges. That was our drain pan. The used oil went into a dry creek bed at the back of the yard. In fact the drain pan lived back there, upside down. Even back then I used to wonder where the oil ultimately went...not everything in the "good old days" was actually good.