History repeats itself - Lister imports to India

[veggie]

Mark Twain said " History never repeats itself....but it does rhyme."

In the 1950's, India placed an import ban on Lister diesel engines from England in a attempt to block the CS engines from entering.
Perhaps an attempt to protect the growing Indian small diesel manufacturing market, or perhaps retaliation for the British occupation of India.
In any case, British companies got around the ban by (you guessed it !) selling their engines as air compressor packages.
A business friend in the UK sent me this article from a historical industry book which describes a company who did such an "adjustment" to their Listers in order to export to India.
Amusing  

PS: The scan is large in an attempt to maintain what's left of the print quality.
If the picture is too big for your screen...
Click on the picture to enlarge it...then right click on the enlarged picture and "save target as" to you own computer. Then view it.

enjoy...
veggie

[playdiesel]

That gave me an idea

Sample bill of lading for a container of 6/1 engines

"25 units of casting sand blended with varying amounts of steel furance slag stored in cast iron vessels w/spoked transport wheels"

[vdubnut62]

VERY creative
Ron

[BioHazard]

That's very interesting, I had no idea the Inidians have been making their own engines for so long! (and they still haven't learned how to clean out the casting sand?!)

I find it interesting that we've progressed from engine powered air compressors, to electric motor driven "engines" turned into compressors. 

I still want a twin listeroid with one cylinder set up as a self powered compressor....

[dieselgman]

Hamworthy has done that exact thing with the ST2 Lister - 2 cylinder diesel (made one cylinder an air-compressor powered by the other engine cylinder)... commonly used as a starting plant for ocean-going vessels. Should be easy to do the same exact thing for any Lister CS twin.

dieselgman.

[injin man]

Hamworthy has done that exact thing with the ST2 Lister - 2 cylinder diesel (made one cylinder an air-compressor powered by the other engine cylinder)... commonly used as a starting plant for ocean-going vessels. Should be easy to do the same exact thing for any Lister CS twin.

dieselgman.

So you start the engine with Compressed Air then the Compressor side produces
compressed air, ie you push the other piston with CA?

[dieselgman]

The Hamworthy is based on the very small ST2 diesel. This engine comes from Lister with 2 cylinders running diesel fuel. They just change the head on the second cylinder to a compressor type. The ST then becomes a 1 cylinder diesel and the second cylinder produces the compressed air to charge and operate the starting system for the main engine/s.

dieselgman

[RogerAS]

Heh,

I'm old enough to remember trucks that used air starters. The first one I ever heard, when I was a wee kid, scared the living ____ out of me. My dad and I were going to get some feed or something and parked right beside this truck. When that wheezing air starter kicked in I about jumped out of my skin!

I think there were lots of these air applications in stationary operations, back in the day. Apparently still are in the marine world.

RS

[LowGear]

Is my suspicious nature or can the air compressor be converted back to a second cylinder for the diesel engine with little difficulty?

Casey

[dieselgman]

The Hamworthy at least, is purpose built for air starting bigger machinery. You can change it back to diesel, but will have to add all fuel system components plus a proper cylinder head and valve train. This just illustrates that Lister has long been involved with air compressors and it is not a new idea.

dieselgman

[lowspeedlife]

Grimmer-schmidt did this with Lombardini & Hatz & Deutz diesels in the past. At least the Lombrdini could be changed back with just a complete cylinder head & injection line for eash cylinder. the funny thing is the cylinders that compress air don't wear out. we took 460 & 302 ford v-8's to machine shops with one bank needing bored .060 over & the other bank was still standard bore. made more that one machinist scratch his head.

  Scott R.