@Toby Garner I've had pretty fair luck rehabbing the baseball bat generators by unsoldering the tip, pulling out the mesh and cleaning it, rerolling and soldering the tip back on. That funky pricker rod is a remake I haven't tackled yet, although I think with a small lathe and silver solder it's doable. Nice save.
The shape of the holes is because Akron marketed their lamps under the Diamond Lamps brand. The square knob came about because one of the advertising campaigns used a phrase along the lines of "You get a square deal with Akron Lamps" and one of the presidents of the company thought the square knob would go along with the ads.
Thanks for the kind words folks. I've had several of these instant lighting Akron's, and surprisingly this is the first of these instaglow gens I've had to modify. The missing pricker was an easy swap, but the oversized orfice needed replaced and I usually just install a Coleman orfice for future ease of replacement. Works great for the early and hard to find torch lighting gen tips also.
Toby, great post and love your 132AG here. I hope you're still enjoying it! Question for you and the group: I have a 132G leaking at the cleaning lever-main valve joint, see attached photo with red arrow pointing to the problem area. It seems I have three options to repair this: 1) learn how to safely remove and repack the gear pinion (the gear pinion is not budging so I can repack the graphite, and I am not about to force it out); 2) learn now to somehow pack the cleaning lever rod stem's hexagonal housing; or 3) learn what is behind door #3 that I don't know and need to do that is standard repair protocol for this. Any help would be appreciated!
@Aaron V those cleaning levers are easily removable if you take a pick and remove the old graphite. I just use the graphite tape to repack those. You can get this as most hardware stores in a roll or even buy small sections from old Coleman parts. Just add a little and use the gland nut to pack it in, add a little more and pack it in, etc. Just be careful not to strip those threads as I've seen others do it.
Toby - thank you very much. Seems straight-forward. I have the graphite tape already. I'll post photos once completed. Appreciate the insight, thanks again.
