During disassembly, there were several parts that were broken because of poor handling on my part. Several more parts were already broken, and several parts missing completely. Except for the Flywheel, which I will elaborate on further in another article, the most disturbing part was the cam shaft. After several weeks of soaking, it still seemed hard fast.
So I put a little leverage on it, and of course it snapped right off. I dropped the nut with the broken end of the shaft into a small can with blaster and left it for several weeks.
One night after an unusually depressing day, I felt like taking some frustration out by freeing that nut. This was probably not a very good idea since I had the notion to get it free no matter what it took. I pulled it out of the blaster, put it in the vise, and pulled out the torch to prepare to use heat to get it free. Before I fired up the torch I thought I would try to get it out as it stood, so I stuck the easy-out into the hole (nicely provided already for the governor actuator shaft) And put a nice 12″ adjustable wrench on it. It started to turn with almost no effort! BUT it was turning the wrong way! If I had studied this just a little bit closer, I could have noticed that it was a left hand thread, not a right hand thread, and prevented the next bit of headaches.
So after freeing the nut from the shaft, the next task was to get the shaft put back together. My grandpa suggested using silver solder, so that was what I tried.
The first attempt to solder this together seemed like a good idea, but failed terribly. We cut a ring of silver solder sheet the same size as the shaft and put a long bolt through the center of the long end of the shaft, slipped the solder ring over the bolt then put the broken end of the shaft over that- sort of like a sandwich. A spring was used to apply pressure to the broken end as the solder melted. I used the torch to heat the whole assembly to the melting point of the silver solder, but after the solder melted and I removed the heat, the broken piece just fell right off again. Somehow my grandpa was able to repair it the next day while I was at work. I believe that he heated the pieces first separately, applied solder to them (tinning them) then put them together with heat. It worked beautifully. After cleaning the threads, it is as good as new.