First Aid for old cold diesels.

oh not the "bulldog", we had one at Gnowangerup.... and as you only know it was blddy cold...

There was one of those old tracors that they heated up the intake manifold with a blow torch when starting to help vaporise the Power kerosene

G'day westskip, now you mention it I recall the blowtorch warm up being spoken about in the wheatbelt. The tractor may have been a Lanz but Deutz springs to mind maybe because the farmer was German not that that is important, it is the inginuity of solving the hard start which is interesting.

Actually my father-in-law bought a couple of old ones to use in his orchard at Donnybrook. He would mount a water pump on the front driven by a pulley off the flywheel and pump out of a couple of soaks. He would start them up as soon as it got dry and then they'd virtually pump non stop all summer. System worked well then after perfecting it he sold the orchard.

John

They reckon that if you left one of those Buldogs idling in a boggy paddock and came back an hour or so later you wouldn't find it, they would sink.
Probably just a joke but they were rough on idle, weren't they.
Bruce.

In the early 60's, the old man had an English Field Marshall, 6-litre, single cyl tractor for pumping on the farm (also Donnybrook) - like above, he mounted a 4" pump on the front of the tractor and ran belts off the flywheel. Whereas the Lanz used a blowtorch to heat the pre-ignition chamber, the Field Marshall used ignited paper treated with salt petre. The paper was rolled up, ingited and inserted into the cylinder head on a long shaft and tightened down. The engine could then be started from cold, the burning paper lasting long enough to allow the fuel to burn from cold. For really cold starts, the engine also had a shotgun cartridge, specially made for this tractor. Basically a normal cartridge without the lead shot. This was mounted in a breech, and fired. The charge went through a pipe into the cylinder via the decompression valve. Worked every time, but it was an expensive way of starting the tractor, so it was only used for really cold starts. But it took some practice to get it started with the crank. One had only 4 turns of the crank before the decompression valve shut. As a skinny 17yo, it took quite a technique to master getting a 6L engine with large flywheels up to speed in 4 turns!
Many farmers bought up these old single cylinder tractors quite cheaply for irrigating, as they had limited use as a proper tractor, but were wonderfully reliable and economical as a pump engine.
Gerry

History Lesson

These motors were actually not diesel motors. They were run on diesel fuel but would run on heavier fuel (crude oil engines.) They were Hot Bulb engines. Their compression ratio was too low to work on the diesel principle. The piece below is from Wickepedia:

The hot bulb engine, or hotbulb or heavy oil engine is a type of internal combustion engine. It is an engine in which fuel is ignited by being brought into contact with a red hot metal surface inside a bulb. Most hot bulb engines were produced as one-cylinder low-speed two-stroke crankcase scavenging units.

For further reading see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_bulb_engine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Akroyd_Stuart

Site Link

It's also interesting to note that Herbert Akroyd Stuart was the actual inventer of the diesel engine and not Rudolf Diesel.

Hi Peter,
yes you're right about the Lanz Bulldog being a hot bulb engine.
However, the single-cyl Field Marshall was a true diesel. It used ignition paper merely to get the engine going, then it ran as a proper high-compression 2-stroke diesel.
Gerry

G'day Doomagee Roadhouse, I am generalising about diesels and fishing for peoples opinions and experiences.

G'day Notso, thats another memory jogger, same thing in major WA stations. Howabout the hair dryer left blowing warm air on the radiator hose, that might do the same thing.

This is the UK version of the plug-in engine heater Kenlowe Pre-Heater

Kelvo

Thanks Kelvo, surprising what is out there when you tap into others knowlege.

My cousin in Sudbury Ont has one but I believe it is 110 volt

Thanks westskip, yes it is relevant as it shows the inginuity to adapt the cars to the cold.

G'day Tony(ACT), the Masseys have a genetic advantage because they were born and bred in the UK and are no doubt used to the cold though I notice yours is a bit of a wimp having to spend the night in the shed.

G'day Bucky, thanks for the snapshot. I think todays young people would relish the challenges of the past but they are carried along with todays technology.

G'day Bill, nicely put, the evolution of preheaters in a few sentences.

Yeah Rockape, those pilot motors didn't do much work but they sure were troublesome. I ditched ours and converted to 12 volt electric start.
And thereby hangs a tale.

I heard some years ago that the guys on the convoys up in Siberia used to pour petrol over their engines and light it to get going of a morning, that was about 30 odd years ago. Don't know if it was true but it would not surprise me in the least.
Cheers, Bruce.

G'day Rockape, yep, know the feeling, had a brief experience with that system with a D2 or D4 as a 16 yo. I think the pilot motor was a single or twin cylinder electric start petrol. The jerk off moment was when you pulled the lever to engage the pilot clutch to the big donk and the big diesel belched into life. There may have been some decompression lever manipulation needed. Rough as guts to drive but you didn't have to worry about puntures to the steel tracks. Capturing the exhaust heat from the pilot motor was clever engineering.

Farmboywa, the pilot motors were a twin horizontally oposed water cooled magneto fired rope start on the smaller units (D4) and electric start on a D7 I drove once.
The pilot motor uses the main motor cooling system and so is warming the engine coolant, although only slightly, as well as heating the inlet manifold.

We overhauld the pilot motor on our D4 buit it was always a pain. Probably a magneto problem but I eventually got onto a 12 volt starter for the old girl and modified the dozer and now she is as easy as can be to start. She just demands a drink of ether for a nerve tightener before she will go. Once she is warm she will start like the cruiser.
Bruce.

Farm young bloke from WA and Bruce C,

I also can't remember if it was 1 cylinder or 2 but I thing it was 2. If you didn't start the beautiful thing on the second go you were going to get very, very wild, again and again and again.

I used to love greasing all the track rollers every morning and filling the old girl with a quart stroke pump by hand, especially when I would lose count of how many strokes I had done , then just wait for the diesel to run down over my retarded head when it was full.

Bruce,
You were a smart person, I drove the latter D9G's and then the H's which were electric start.

Have a good one both of you and I will be emailing a mate of mine who works in Siberia and find out how they do it.

Let us all know Rockape as my info is about 40 years old. Probably a load of BS but made for good story telling.

Bruce,

if and when he gets back to me I will MM you and find out how they keep them warm, pretty sure they will just use sump heaters.