This is my homage to early Pope from the 60s and 70s. In technical terms this is a Pope hybrid. It has taken me over 6 months to complete. It started out my uncle gave me an engine off of the first Pope mower he ever owned, which might have been a Simpson-Pope but I can't be sure. It was the one with the entirely closed in cowl. The engine has rotary valves. A short time later I happened to acquire a base from a 1970s model. What you see here are my efforts to rebuild a "retro" Pope mower that looks close to their original design, in a general sense.
I had a Pope fuel tank but decided not to use it, because it was a bit too beaten up and rusty. The Villiers tanks are always much easier to fit to old mowers that have lost their tanks and I just happened to have a nice, clean one at my disposal. The cowl is essentially half Tecumseh, half Briggs and Stratton, with the back half overlayed to make it look like a traditional Pope cowling shape. The recoil starter is Tecumseh.
The engine required an adaptor plate to fit to the base and then the shaft required extending both top and bottom with high tensile fittings. I decided to key these for extra safety. The blade disc is H. G. Palmer, the blades are Rover, the blade bolts are HT plough bolts and I used Rover nyloc nuts and Victa washers. Various other parts were re-engineered, or repurposed to re-make a working mower. I looked at old photos and illustrations the whole time to try to keep it looking close to an original Pope design.
Had problems sourcing paint, but ended up settling for good old Killrust for the white and the orange is Rustoleum "Kubota Orange".
Wheels are brand new, genuine Pope. Hubcaps: Only one original could be fitted successfully, the rest were beyond my abilities to fit, so I made replicas from metal candlestick saucers and fixed them in place with glue and white silicon.
I tried to keep the carby filter and snorkel looking as close to original as possible. It goes but I don't want to use it too much. After spending so many hours and dollars on this thing, the last thing I want to do is get it dirty or knock paint off. LOL!
