Saving Old Seagulls

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whats this one like then? i notice it has a straight exhaust and some have the lovely pear shaped one...i see the flat outlet and ribbed head ,photo isn't the best also...

This is the father of the Seagull 102,
it looks like an "ON or OP" long shaft.
Can't comment on the condition as the pics not good enough.
With several days to go £68.00 seems a lot of money for a motor that you can't see much of.

Providing it has a good cylinder & complete gear box & prop i.e. all the right bits, they seem to fetch approching £100.

But as the motor is almost 70 years old you should expect a badly worn top main bearing & all the lower unit bushes to be very tired if your lucky!

Very few spares are available for pre war motors & only used ones, so rebuilding in a good running condition might be problematical.

So "Caveat Emptor" applies.

I always lift an eyebrow at older 'Gulls on eBay. Although I've had a couple of 'wins' I'm always ver wary of buying something I can't see, especially if the photo is poor. An experienced seller knows when a sharp set of photos may not be a good idea.

Wish I could make out the transom bracket...

I got the guy to post some extra images. I'm just interested but not as a bidder. Is it what it should be... I know little about these older motors??

David

From the new photos it looks exactly as it should be.

Note the steel tank with bayonet filler cap and air bleed; metal fuel pipe with a natty fuel tap. Amal bottom feed carb with a bleed valve and trumpet air intake. Finned cylinder head on a short water jacket block. Early 'coolie hat' flywheel.

The transfer on the tank looks OK from here, and the gearbox is the right shape.

All in all it looks very much like the real thing to me. The transom bracket is the right type - I can't quite make out if it's all there, the photo shows an additional lug which may have served as a height adjuster in the past.

So - to me at least from the photos - it looks very much like a pretty complete 1937 motor. I can't quite make out the serial number, but if it's got 'Marston' on it then it is probably 1937 or very early 1938 (They probably had a few old tanks to use up). At any rate the actual motors were identical in all respects.

There's a possibility it's got a spring drive. If it has it's been converted. Later ON models were made with the spring drive and became DONs.

It's a nice one to own, and if complete with no major problems like a cracked block is very cheap as I type at less than £76.

What do you reckon, other Charles?

Finned cylinder head on a short water jacket block?

did they actually have a separate cylinder head on those then?

serial number looks like O N and some numbers to me...would that be right...

It's an "ON" as Charles said, & it looks honest! & it looks 70 years old.

Can't see the prop but seems to have one.

Fully restored could be worth around £150 but will probably take more than that to put it in that condition.

Drive shaft tube rechroming circa £35.00 if it is not too badly pitted,
prop nut circa £20 if you can get someone to remanufacture,
1 complete transom screw with thrust pad about £50 if it needs one & they usually do, & 30 hours of your own time.

I will wager that the top main bearing is almost unusable as they justabout always are, & don't expect the drive shaft to be in great condition as these have a round one with square keys & are a bastard to remove.

I broke a conrod trying to pull one off a seized cylinder & that wasn't a bugger moment, much worse.

Sorry if I seem negative, I won't be bidding, but stripping & rebuilding one of these is not an east task without access to a tame machine shop that do "lunch time jobs" for cash.

I work on the principal that you have to start with 2 of these to end up with a good serviceable one.

If the winning bidder cares to PM me I will provide telephone support & access to any parts that we are currently remanufacturing or are about to.

Niander, sorry about my poor choice of phrase. Should say something like 'fins at the cylinder head end' - of course it's a one piece casting. Rather a nice one.

ON is right. An OJ would have a different coolant return to the silencer - a sort of cast ring round the tube, which had an upper rudder pintle integral with it, and a rather complicated bottom end to the exhaust itself. But all the O series 102s are essentially very similar, as are the short water jacket wartime versions. I'm still struggling very hard attempting to detect any differences between the SNP on the bench at the moment and an SD. Mainly the difference seems to be a rather crude finish on the SNP, and that's it. I'm sure there's something I've missed, though.

Charles I'm not sure that 30 hours would do the trick with that ON. I'm not decrying the thing - from the photos it looks honest enough. £35 for a chrome job on the tube would sound about right for a one-off; of course it would have to be accompanied by the exhaust - nothing looks worse than one done and the other not. Modern chrome is a rather garish colour, maybe someone reading this knows how to replicate 1930's chrome. In fact I'm rather hoping someone knows how to replicate 1930's zinc plating too...

Even if you assume it's not seized, if you assume the magneto works, and you assume there are no cracks in the block then a complete strip and refurnbish is going to take a long time.

With these older ones you can't afford to rush into something and break a component - as we both know they can be a b****r (that word again) to replace, so you have to treat the things with kid gloves.

(When I see adverts for a complete strip and refurbish from a certain chap in the North West I chuckle - his hourly rate must be absolutely minimal if he really does do all he reckons. You have to factor in the broken stud incidents and the 'no visible hexagon' difficulties and the 'ping and vanish' interludes. ) And he still has my name on his website, cheeky b****r... (and again)

You have to be confident that every fastener is going to come apart for you - and some of those on that ON have been sitting there quietly corroding for seventy years. You'll have to replace at least some of the bearings - and that's a case for the right reamer and the know-how to use it.

So 30 hours is possibly a little light. (Obviously it'll take longer for everyone that hasn't bought one of your spanner sets! )

Of course, you could simply buy the thing and enjoy it for what it is.

On that subject - if anyone is about to dismantle a 102 (not necessarily anything very old or special) - the other Charles and I are planning to do a series of articles rebuilding one. Maybe you could supply the photos?
PM either of us if you think you may be interested.

£160 somebody wants this real bad!
Maybe I could turn some of the occupants of my outboard racks into a pension fund.
It's still got 2 days to go!

I agree charles,there seams to be to many unknowns to me,think i would want to see it in the flesh before going that high,photos are not the best either.just a thought, i gather that you along with a few others on this forum have large collections,do you insure them,and if so how do you place a value on them,i really wouldn't know the value of even my humble collection,i know what i paid for them but would you have to factor in time/money spent on there overhaul,restoration etc.

Considering there are 452 registered users of this site and growing I would say interest in Seagulls is definately increasing.

Hugo

I value my collection highly. When I factor in the time I've spent on them the average 40 plus is quite obviously worth hundreds of pounds, and taking that into account I have insured them accordingly.

Now where's that box of matches and the petrol can?....

Paul I think you've just defined the reason why we have never seen a "restored" Marston for sale.

Even an external cleanup & polish restoration on an "ON" will take 30+ hours a £7 tin of smooth black hammerite, one of £6 decent etch primer, £10 pounds of buffing wheels & £5 pounds of buffing soap, not including all the nuts & bolts that have to be custom made to match the origonal & the rechroming.
Your going to be looking at a value, if you charge your own labour at £10 per hour of circa £600 for a Seagull that was never made like that & sold by Marston, & is really an SD with a finned cylinder & a flash petrol tap.
This is an amount of money much larger than any serious outboard collector would pay for a static exhibit
To turn this motor into one you can run on the back of your clinker on a sunny Sunday could raise its overall cost to approching a £1000.

No one in their right mind is going to sell all this blood sweat & tears for 3 or 4 hundred pounds, when it owes then at least twice that.

As for insurance, can you name a company that would cough up enough to replace a Marston twin, when one owner (a aircraft industry mechanical engineer) I know spent 40 hours refurbing just the teardrop exhaust, & there are only 4 to be known still in existance Worldwide.

Every year a few more Marstons appear from the back of grandad's shed just hope that the shed is just down the road from you.

No comments so far on the final price??

Had it not been for the slightly negative comments above from those who know while the auction was runing I would have thought £232 was not too bad.

Of course as with all EBay items there is a certain risk with condition but with the images the guy added it did give the impression of a genuine one that might be a reasonable runner.

On EBay there are quire a lot of ordinary Seagulls that make £160... and then folks will pay £20-£30 carriage on top. So the extra this Marston made didn't seem too bad.

I know from other "collecting" areas I'm involved in that you can rarely re-coup restoration costs if you factor in labour... it has to be for the love of it. An example is a 1960s S-Type Jaguar I look after. It has receipts in its file for £30,000 of parts and restoration work carried out 5yrs ago.... yet 3yrs ago the current owner bought it from the guy who had it restored and paid him just £20,000.

£10,000 was quite a loss for the love of it!

BTW did I spot a twist grip throttle on the Marston... I guess that was added more recently?

David