Re: Found in a shed!
Johnson sold a million of those old 5s. My dad bought a new 2? right after WWII to run on the back of the wooden boat he made. Later he traded it for a 1950 TN-26 (the same motor as the TD-20 except that a neutral clutch was added, necessitating a relocation of the impeller to the midsection. Dad used that motor a lot until he wore it out. He replaced it in 1965 with a new 9?, leaving the old 5 under a tarp in the basement since 1964. I think it ran once in 1976. Today I have the motor fully restored.
The only thing I need to address is the lack of leather washers for the carb. It will leak, and the plunger feels loose, but it runs nicely. We used a newer TN-28 block that was much tighter in the bearings than the original worn out block. The 1952-53 blocks used the regular points that are readily available, not the hard to find, expensive and hard to set guillotine-style points of the predecessors.
See the attached picture of my motor running. I have the lower cowling removed so you can see the pee stream at the elbow of the water tube (you might need to squint to see the water stream in the picture). I'm running it on a later style Johnson stand, but I have a correct genuine 1949-51 Sea Green Johnson stand that it sits on with a red nameplate & the old block capital JOHNSON script. It looks great sitting on the stand.
