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  • Today On The Billy Ho Show

    From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Thu Nov 7 04:51:44 2024
    XPost: alt.engineering

    Just a few minutes ago, I saw Bill Hohepa talk to a man with a tractor
    he’d had for 30 years (though I think it was older). It had a single- cylinder diesel engine, and a rather unusual starting procedure.

    First you had to put a couple of squirts of fuel into the cylinder, by
    manually turning the crankshaft to trigger the fuel injector. Then you had
    to reposition the crankshaft to the start position. Next, you lit a little piece of paper (soaked in saltpetre) into a nice, smouldering state, and inserted that into a cavity where it would heat the glowplug.

    Finally, there was a cartridge containing gunpowder (or was it cordite) --
    like a blank cartridge you would use in a gun -- that you had previously inserted and locked in place into its own cavity, with a firing pin
    protruding through the cap; hit this smartly with a hammer, and it would explode the cartridge (with a bang and a puff of smoke) and get the piston moving, and the engine would start running.

    I wonder how many of those cartridges you needed in a typical working
    day ...

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Thu Nov 7 07:22:50 2024
    XPost: alt.engineering

    On Thu, 7 Nov 2024 04:51:44 -0000 (UTC), I wrote:

    Just a few minutes ago, I saw Bill Hohepa talk to a man with a tractor
    he’d had for 30 years (though I think it was older). It had a single- cylinder diesel engine, and a rather unusual starting procedure.

    Looks like it was one of these
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Marshall>. That article says the
    tractors dated from the 1950s. It also says the shotgun starting
    system tended to put more strain on the engine than crank-handle-style starting.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)