Fairbanks-Morse Oil Engine - Wallace, ID - Preserved Machines on Public Display on Waymarking.com

View waymark gallery

Fairbanks-Morse Oil Engine - Wallace, ID

in Preserved Machines on Public Display

Posted by:  T0SHEA

11T E 580294 N 5258927

At the west end of the little town of Wallace is a great museum which will almost certainly appeal to the gearheads of the world. This is a open display and can be viewed at anytime free of change.

The "museum" is actually the Wallace Chamber of Commerce. At their site on River Road just south of I-90 they have put together displays of mining machinery, geology and rock displays, some sculpture and a memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives in the Great Fire of 1910, which burned several towns in northeast Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana.

This, the first of the machines on display at the Chamber of Commerce is a 1920s diesel engine which toiled in underground mines in Idaho. It is a 25 horsepower Fairbanks-Morse single cylinder horizontal engine of the type known as "Stationary" Engines.

Fairbanks-Morse Oil Engine

This Fairbanks-Morse one cylinder engine is a 25 horsepower "Y" diesel engine. It was manufactured in the early 1920s, weighs about 7,200 pounds. and runs on most oil based fuels. It was last used at the Buffalo-Idaho mine and mill near Golden, Idaho located on the South fork of the Clearwater River in Central Idaho. It was obtained in 1989, and eventually moved to the current location and restored for display in 2015. Fairbanks-Morse engines, smaller or larger, provided reliable power to operate rock crushers, stamp mills, electrical generators, water pumps and air compressors. This engine powered a line shaft that provided power to a rock crusher that fed the crushed gold ore to a stamp mill. This Fairbanks-Morse engine was donated to the Mining Heritage Exhibition by Charles M. Stone.