Cars is a loose sense - actually they are roadgoing tug versions of the Lanz Bulldog tractor. Single cylinder 2-stroke diesel engine. Not unlike the British Field Marshalls.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyRI5wV6PWo&feature=related
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 22/07/2009 at 15:29
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Seems they were ticking over at about 200 RPM?
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The big single cylinder engine is transverse and horizontal, with the cylinder head facing forward. the steering column was removable and could be attached to the flywheel to hand-start the engine!!!
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Is that a hot bulb engine? In the Youtube clip of one being started there seems to be the sound of a gas burner and there is a gas cylinder.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanz_Bulldog
According to the link above Hotbulb was still being used in 1939! It is describe somewhere else as a 'semi-diesel', how this can be I do not understand, unless it was possible to use higher volatility fuels without the hot bulb being heated.
I suppose another possibility is that the hot bulb was only use for starting, as a rudimentary glowplug.
What was the compression ratio? I would have thought that hand staring with the steering wheel was an interesting proposition!
Edited by pmh3 on 20/07/2009 at 14:05
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Hot bulb engines are indeed called semi diesels, I think because one had to apply a secondary heat source to get them going. The canal boat version may now be becoming illegal as they do produce a lot of soot, but you really had to get the bulb near glowing to start them at all. And you don't stop them either as a restart can take 10 minutes! But they will run on quite odd fuels - the original diesel was made to burn peanut oil!
Super video, but then I am a fan of oddball machinery.
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I actually have a Japy Frere hot bulb stationary engine circa 1904 - with variable valve (exhaust) timing that is used to regulate the running speed. It was designed to run on alcohol (what a waste). I keep meaning to get it running. The problem is that the South of France temperatures are not conducive to either physical or mental activity, or maybe the the clue is in my second sentence?.
The only part that is missing is the burner (altho I have a Bunsen burner to hand that I will try to modify to run of LP Butane/propane. It will require an adhoc cooling arrangement, but looking at other examples I cannot work out how the original cooling was achieved without significant leakage, unless it relied on a continuous supply of water.
The compression ratio does not seem to be that high, I had assumed that the hot bulb/tube was required to initiate ignition at all times.. ie not dieseling. Unless you are going to tell me differently.
I thought that 'diesel' was a descriptor applied to a compression ignition engine?
Edited by pmh3 on 20/07/2009 at 14:50
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This link shows one being started with the steering wheel!!!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRmV7fsJHo0&feature=related
He appears to spin it back against compression which seems enough to kick it over in the opposite direction. It looks like he has to whip out the steering wheel pretty quickly too!
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pmh3
I'm sad to say that the only hot bulb engine that I have seen in real life had been removed from a WW1 amunition barge and by the time that I saw it most of it was missing.
As reagards your cooling system I definitly have seen low powered stationary engines with just and open topped tank for cooling. Not a back yard lash up but looked like definitly put tegeter that way by the manufacturer. A long time ago and I would imagine the engines that I saw would have been old then.
As regards diesel being a descriptor for a compression ignition engine, I thought that Herr Diesel set out to build a high compression engine, well really waht he wanted was hi expansion but in the real world that means high compression, and the fact that it was compression ignition was just a necessary corollary.
PS, does anyone know of one of these vehicals in England. I'd love to see one.
Edited by lotusexige on 21/07/2009 at 12:40
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I was at a historic auto everything show recently, and many of the stationary engines on display, (and running), had an open topped cooling tank around the vertical cylinder(s) and no radiator.
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Those Lanzmanns are splendid. One of the videos shows a guy idling the engine down until it simply oscillates back and forth 180 degrees. It clearly runs equally well in either direction.
In Oz last winter, at Parkes, NSW, where the radio telescope is, went round an agricultural machinery museum. There's an American tractor there called the Big Four, I'd say from 1920 and perhaps earlier. It has 8 foot diameter spoked steel driving wheels and a colossal four-cylinder petrol engine, with separate castings for each cylinder, like something out of a Zeppelin or Edwardian racer, visible valve springs and stems (side valve of course), and a tiny little modernish contact-breaker distributor transplanted, obviously, from a car. We were the only people there and the two old geezers staffing the place cranked the engine up by hand and got it started. It poured oil, fuel and coolant from every pore but was clearly in good running order.
One of the old blokes even said he'd driven the thing. Rather him than me, with iron front wheels too and traction-engine-style steering with a little crank operating a beam front axle through loose-looking chains.
I took some pics and a video of the thing running, but I don't know how to post them.
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Many thanks for the comments on cooling systems. Many people just use water convection cooling from a small auxiliary tank on similar engines. However mine is built on a large 'reservoir' as its base that was obviously part of its cooling system, I would just love to find a silmilar set up so I could replicate it.
For anybody interested my engine is very similar to sn691 shown at
home.scarlet.be/~tsd97269/japypictures.htm
but built by a system integrator who installed a double pump and a wheeled base with integral water storage that probably also functioned as a rudimentary radiator.
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Two stroke reverse-able diesel engines used to be common in merchant ships. They used compressed air to start them. The fun was bringing a ship alongside without a tug - the air tanks often only had enough for three or four starts.
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I once spent a day as a guest of the German navy on a Fast patrol boat. Powered by 3x 3,000hp direct drive diesels, minimum speed 7kts at idle on one engine. That also makes for entertaining manouvering. Similar set up with the air tanks.
Edited by Old Navy on 21/07/2009 at 17:08
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As a child, went for a brief spin in a genuine steam pinnace belonging to a major British warship visiting the harbour I then lived beside. A most dramatic and dangerous device, open, broad in the beam like a very large dinghy filled with machinery and a huge boiler, with hot pipes running everywhere. I scalded my hand by putting it under a jet of water coming out of the side of the thing, and the enormous, dead-hard sailors running it showed scant sympathy with my lubberly, unseamanlike ways.
It didn't spoil the fun though. That thing went like the clappers, scuttling round the harbour like a flea. .
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ON - after I crunched my collar-bone and couldn't fly on 705 for a while I went to HMS Sabre at Portland. She did 45 knots on twin Avon gas turbines in a flat sea, using a gallon a minute. Best fun I ever had on the surface!
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ONB, I think the fastest I have travelled on waterbourne RN machinery was a ride scrounged on the Boeing jetfoil (HMS Speedy) the RN had for trials, 50kts on stilts.
Edited by Old Navy on 21/07/2009 at 20:20
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oldnotbold, what did you fly?
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