[SEL] New Year's Crank Up

[Dickie]

Fired up a JD I have been working on and let it run several hours.

Dick Bauer
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Culp" <johnculp at chartertn.net>
To: "The SEL email discussion list" <sel at lists.stationary-engine.com>
Cc: "Old Engine" <stationary-engine at oldengine.org>
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 10:36 AM
Subject: [SEL] New Year's Crank Up


> 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
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