Tuesday, February 14, 2006
  Another Blast From The Diesel Past
Here's another history lesson with Professor DZA.

The Lister Diesel engine was first manufactured in 1929 by The R A Lister & Co. It was a small, air cooled, hand cranked diesel engine. They were available in either one or two cylinder versions. The rated horsepower of the two cylinder version was around 15 hp. I have personally used one while at dive school. It was powering a Quincy 390 compressor. I had the joy of starting it by hand every single day when we were on dive ops. It started with out glow plugs or electricity of any kind, ran for 12 hours on 2 gallons of diesel fuel, and supplied breathing air for a hyperbaric chamber and 7 divers. I've been told that big dive companies like Caldive still use them every day on their dive boats. There's a reason for that. Reliability. They need their oil changed every 250 hours, and they need to be kept full of fuel. Thats it. There's very little to go wrong, and in the rare event that something does go wrong, its either the injector or the injector pump. There's a bunch of people who have made generators for them to run their houses during power outages, and yes, they will run on B100 very nicely.


Heres a picture of one:


 
Comments:
Only 0.17 gals/hr? That's only 1/2 gal/hr per 50 hp. Thats a damn efficient engine. Normally they come in around 1 gal/hr/50hp. I guess if it's running steadily like that it would help.
 
Although, I guess it only counts if you're running it at full tilt all day.
 
keep in mind that this was running a compressor. The compressor was cycling on and off, so the load that the engine was under went from max to min. It was not running under max load all day long.
 
I guess what I'm saying is that the statement "runs for 12 hours on 2 gallons of diesel fuel" is misleading. I bet if you loaded it down you could get it to burn up to 3.6 gallons in 12 hours.
 
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