I seem to remember hearing that some of these 8Ns were made to run on distillates. What kind of distillates, does that mean ethanol? Can a gasoline tractor be easily converted to run on ethanol?

The Distillate fuels of the past required less refining to produce than Gasoline. Before the technology developed to "Crack" the Gasoils into lighter products such as gasoline the distilate cuts were plentiful and therefore less expense than gasoline. The distillates do not vaporize as easily as gasoline so they must be heated through the use of a heated manifold to perform well. Today Kerosene is similar to the Historical Distillates however it is not exactly the same. Ethanol is an alcohol produced from plants at is not related in any way to distillate fuels.

Check the manuals section above for the distillate burning 8NAN supplement to the 8N manual. Tells you all you need to now about the distillate burning 8N. 9NAN used a vaporizor, it is in many old parts manuals.

bigger jet required for sure-I used to run methanol in racecars, timing might need adjustment

I'm not sure about the ethanol thing but I do know they were made to run on kerosine and propane.

what steps were needed to convert for running on kerosene? also same question for propane.

I believe the only thing was the carburation or vaporizer. You would have to check the master parts catalog and see what parts are listed.

Thanks for the info Farmer Dan. I'll check that out. Just for grins have you heard of anybody doing a convert to kerosene? just thinking it might make a fun project.

Kerosene is getting harder to find all the time. Only conversion I've heard of is converting back to gasoline.

Farmer Dan; did some research on thr kerosene and it seems you need a 8NAN carberator to burn that fuel. I picked this up from an old forum on another sight one of the contributors, that seemed to know quite a bit was Soundguy.

The 9NAN model used a special vaporizing carb and a fuel tank with two compartments.That's why the sheet metal stamping for your fuel tank has two bezels where fuel caps could be, although only one of them is used. The tractor was started on gasoline and switched to kero once the motor warmed up.

The 9NAN was mostly intended for the export market, especially Europe. Very, very few were sold in the US. For whetever reason, kero was much cheaper there than gasoline.

We have at least one poster (Alan of Scotland) who has an original 9NAN. He reports that carb parts are simply unavailable.

Kero was cheaper but not by a whole lot. Kero burners were popular where gas was heavily taxed and kero had little or no tax. Some western states and provinces had tax laws that made the kero a good option so some NAN's were found there. Even in MI our neighbor had a new 8NAN, just bought it off the dealers lot for no particular reason. Likely the tax issue was important in europe. Hard to figure, the most popular light tractor in Europe in those days was the TE-20 and they were about all gas burners??

The fact that Harry's tractors were all gasoline & diesel(not kero)always seemed odd to me too. I guess he knew the Euro market better than Henry? Or, the kero setup was the least expensive compromise alternative to gas. Makes you wonder if Harry ever argued about developing a diesel for the 9N/2N, but Henry didn't want to outsource it, or WWII came along & got in the way.

Come to think of it, though, Henry would have had to retool a bunch of the N's sheet metal to fit a diesel in there. Hard to keep production costs down making changes like that.

Jeff

Yep very smart man. He should know a lot about them.

Thanks FD if I find anything different I'll let you know. and you're right about the kerosene have a heater in the shop that may be retired due to lack of fuel.