Traded with an American collector a month or two ago for this Akron 107. I’ve always liked an extended pump design on lanterns and the styling of the Akron’s is just beautiful. A straightforward clean and service bar the check valve which wasn’t working. These are an interesting arrangement as there is just a small hole at the bottom of the pump tube and no way to extract the valve. I presume the valve is more accessible from the other end of the pump tube but I was reluctant to remove the pump tube from the fount as I had applied reasonable force to it and it wasn’t budging. Some of these were soldered I think I read somewhere. Anyway, a few days soaking in carburettor cleaner and the ball bearing released. A couple of marks and dents on this but as it is likely celebrating its 100th birthday this year it is in amazing condition. The nickel plating on this seems particularly good quality. It fired up first time with a short delay on one of the two mantles initially but it soon kicked in and burned well.
I just acquired this one a couple of days ago (must be later than yours since it has the internal pump). The pic is before I started working on it-- the frame has had an evaporust and steel wool treatment, and the interior of the fount was nasty and required a significant amount of rinsing as well as the BB dance to clear it out. I have a straight repro generator from Old Coleman Parts for it-- I did try lighting it once but the genny immediately plugged up so I had to clean that out and that's when I decided to go get some BBs and do that. The repro generator has what looks like pipe cleaner in it (assuming the fuzz on it is fireproof) which was easy to pull out and clean, and I just used my tip cleaner and some carb cleaner to make sure the tip was open! Yours is gorgeous. I hope mine cleans up as nicely! Chris
