[SEL] New Year's Crank Up

[John Culp]

Only thing I fired up for New Year's was Dolly Diesel, the Listeroid. I 
hadn't had her out and running in a good while, and had a lot of junk 
piled up in front that had to be moved. As I was pushing her out I saw 
Callie, my engine buddy, headed back from eating on the back deck to 
the neighboring dairy barn where she spends most of her time. I called 
her, and she came back. She looked a little puzzled at first, then 
recognized what was going on as I prepared to crank Dolly. She started 
loudly purring and "talking" to me like a mother cat does to her 
kittens.

The SAE 30 oil on top of the head to lube the valves had all leaked 
down past the valve stems into the combustion chamber, and that created 
a bit of trouble getting her going. She gurgled loudly through the open 
exhaust valve as I cranked her, and I kept her spinning till I felt 
enough of the oil had been ejected that I wouldn't get a solid 
hydraulic lock on letting the exhaust valve close. There was enough oil 
in the chamber to raise the compression ratio to a level I couldn't 
spin past compression, still. It'd stop the flywheels and bounce back. 
I spun her some more with the exhaust valve held open, and got enough 
oil pumped out that I was just able to get her to spin over and fire, 
and she sped up normally with a great cloud of white smoke from the 
exhaust. (If that hadn't worked, I'd've opened the compression 
changeover valve to lower the compression ratio. Maybe I should've 
tried it sooner.)

The 230V bathroom heater I rescued from curbside a few years ago as a 
load for Dolly's generator wouldn't come on, so I let her just idle for 
a few hours, slobbering out a terrible mess of sticky jet black oil 
from the exhaust. Keeping a moderate load on prevents that. I did test 
the generator to make sure it's generating, by spinning up my bench 
grinder with the 120V output. Looks like that heater's going back to 
the curb. Else I may just completely bypass the thermostat in it to run 
the fan and heater continuously, which would really be better as an 
engine load, anyway.

While Dolly was running, I fired up my gas powered turkey fryer with 
the big cast iron pot and melted down 250 lbs or so of scrap lead to 
make ingots for future bullet casting. Ladeled it out into cast iron 
corn stick moulds, from which it dropped out as shiny silver-colored 
ears of corn. If any future archeologists find some of my ingots, 
they'll really wonder about those. Callie stuck around close while I 
was doing the melting, hopping up and snuggling in my lap while I 
waited for the burner to do its work.

Jane said it was good to hear Dolly running again. :-)

John Culp
Bristol, Tennessee, USA