Ok, so apart from Guy_F's tangential rant - where he makes the usual load of sweeping generalisations and gives very little hard evidence to the topic at hand - I've seen a couple of good responses. I've poked through the board, and whilst I've seen many,many references to what-may-hap? , I see very few references to actual injury or death directly attributable to a lister/listeroid engine failure of any kind. I say again, mainly for Guy_F's benefit -
- There are no doubt quite a few people who own engines here.
- They are all of extremely variable quality. (The engines, that is!)
- Not knowing precisely how many people run their machines 24/7 , one can only guess at the total hours run by all of them. 200K?
- I have yet to read a post where someone has been seriously injured (that is, hospitalised) by their engine. I've seen a lot of 'could haves', but nothing yet that's gone all the way to the final result. Apart from dumb luck (eg. it exploded but there was no-one around) - all the other things that stopped it from reaching the point of injury are legitamate controls, such as monitoring machine noises, good shutdown controls, guarding/retaining parts, regular inspections, co-incidental inspections (saw something while glancing over the machine) etc.
So, are we blowing the probability of it happening all out of proportion? There's no doubt that there is some finite level of risk involved. Whether it's the bogeyman that some paint it to be is debatable.
Don't give me references to propane tanks, shuttles and a million other things that have bitten people on the ass that are 'sort of the same' as running a listeroid. There are enough people on this board that we can get a good idea of the 'average' listeroid's safety in 'average' conditions. For a specific engine - we'll never know. Your engine might spit its flywheel out tomorrow and there's not a damn thing anyone here can do about that, that part is up to you to manage as best you can. To really manage that, you need to know the probability and the consequence. We know the consequence, we don't know the probability. Without the probability you can't tell if it's a big risk or if its something that you don't lose sleep over.
So post your engine failures. In addition to that, if you've done some decent time on an engine and everything's been fine, post that too.
with this post, I am outta here. why? it's becoming too dangerous and I am about to cross a line.
I've said before, I had a really old fashioned apprenticeship, and one way or another got exposed to a lot of old stuff, I grew up around compound steam engines and old fashioned internal combustion engines.
Like I said elsewhere about learning hydraulics from one of the guys who developed the battleship gun stabilisers for vospers in the last big one, the significant part about this is you end up being exposed to blokes who worked their whole lives with this shit.
I've seen it happen with the steam game, it went non commercial, then hobby, and now it is sort of regulated a bit, you need boiler certificates etc.
I have been to the lister factory on several occassions, and talked to the movers and shakers there, and the actual reason CS production ended was dwindling markets, but not for lack of demand, but lack of legal profit margin....
You simply cannot sell a diesel engine with twin external flywheels, anyone who is in business will know this, the health and safety and insurance implications are a nightmare.
Guy_Incognito, you're a fucking idiot, in exactly the same way as those who got into steam as a hobby when it went thataway commercially, those who worked with steam had a ___healthy___ respect for it and the potential it had to go disastrously wrong, those who played with it didn't learn this, didn't appreciate it, and "accidents" abounded.
A lister CS or clone is an exposed external flywheel engine, you aren't fit to judge the inherent dangers.
You are all like weekend sailors looking at the nice calm sea and sunshine and ever realising that EVERY saolir knows the instant you step off the land the sea is in charge, and if it chooses it will smash all works of man asunder.
An exposed flywheel engine is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS, and the nature of the danger is such that there is never (to the inexperienced eye) any warning of any kind, one heartbeat you are safe, the next bad things are happening and no human can stop them before they wind themselves down.
I don't give a fuck what experience you think you have, unless you have absorbed, by osmosis, countless decades of experience from people who spent their entire working lives around such machinery then you are a babe in the woods when it comes to exposed rotating machinery.
Same can be said for old fashioned live pulley powered workshops, exposed belt drives, conveyors, waterwheels, steam, and so on.
You are a fucking idiot because you are playing risk assessment with stupid fucking software that does not have as the very first question "How many decades of experience do you have with this particular scenario?" and if the answer is less than two then the whole test returns and null result. You are indulging in security theater because you want to feel good. You lie when you say you are indulging in security, because you don't know what security is.
I know mobile bob feels the same way about me as you do, he makes the same mistake, he thinks his experience of other fields qualifies him to make judgements about exposed flywheel machinery, and he things I'm just trolling, same as you.
___EVERYTHING___ that is playing out here now has happened before, in the steam arena, every year a couple more (despite the embedded safety regulations which we do NOT have here) traction engines get destroyed, people get injured, sometimes killed, and it gets harder and harder to afford a working steam engine cos the fucking asshole who thought he could control a machine that only went 10 mph tops ended up destroying it and whatever was in his way.
Usually when you looked at the steam "accidents" it wasn't rich idiots from the city the caused them, it was fucking arrogant assholes who were experienced in some field of engineering and thought they could apply it to steam intellectually and get sensible answers.
Sometimes in idle moments I remember, I remember a guy, Stan I think was his name, he had one withered hand but that was from birth, so he managed OK, and he ran the lumber bandsaw up at eric englands sawmill, I didn't see the accident so I don't know exactly what happened, nor did stan, it happened too quick, long and short of it was he lost his good hand, driving someone to hospital while they are sobbing "what the fuck am I going to do now (with no hands)?" is something you don't forget, that was 30 years ago, the Ruston dragline used to kill people regularly, usually when they went into the power shed without throwing a pipe in first to earth the charge, euclids maimed people regularly, I could go on and on and on, recounting the maimed, broken and dead bodies, and it wasn't all in third world countries where life is cheap.
I saw the wankie colliery disaster, lots of people who didn't made jokes about kaffirs or niggers and suchlike, but every body that comes up from an underground coal mine explosion is black, and it was 400 men a damn sight braver than me (my family were historically hard rock miners, screw that) died down there, and hundreds of brave men went down after them to get the bodies out.
I've told you all about the workshop driven by overhead fast and loose belts, and the slooooooow guillotine at the end by the door to the toilets, and how people would put their finger in the guillotine, despite the face that there were men working there who had lost fingers doing exactly that in that very machine, the pull of machinery is dangerous and hypnotic.
I guess really the machinery isn't the dangerous thing, it is people, and you're one of em, maybe one day you'll get exposed the that strange atmosphere AFTER an event, picking up bodies and pieces of them off the "field of battle" as it were, maybe then you'll get clue #1, but until that day comes you will still see the FUN or the HOBBY or the PROFIT first, and the DANGER and SAFETY somewhere down the list.
And go fuck yourself with the "if you had your way nobody would get out of bed" bullshit, putting DANGER and SAFETY fist doesn't stop you from doing anything, in fact most of the greatest engineering achievements of mankind would not have been possible without it.... given the technology of the day, things were made as safe as they could be.
You're a fucking menace, and you are fostering an attitude and a belief amongst others that things aren't likely to go wrong, and even if they do it shouldn't be that bad, you should be able to hop out of the way.
Some of us know that with certain types of machinery it is not if but when, and when when becomes reality things go wrong too fast and too hard to stop or dodge out of the way, and if you don't already have safety procedures and working methods in place then not only is your ass grass, not only can your domino set others toppling, but those who have to pick up the pieces are going to assess the ongoing dangers before they rush in to save whats left of your ass for the tribunal.
Exposed flywheel engines, of which Lister CS and Listeroids are a prime example, even before you add a belt drive to an alternator and add high speed belts and electricity to the equation, are INHERENTLY EXTREMELY DANGEROUS and absofuckinglutely WILL kill or main first chance they get.
It is NOT a case of IF, but a case of WHEN.
The "culture" that is evolving here is way too dangerous for me to be associated with any longer, I still have some years of working life ahead of me and I can't afford to be associated with the willfully negligent attitudes on display here, the internet isn't someone's back porch, everything you publish on email or online is likely to come back and bite you on the ass some day.
This is the wrong medium for shooting the shit about subjects that can end up with negligence lawsuits and manslaughter charges, cos everything you say IS recoded and easy found to be used against you.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060410153049/http://listerengine.com/http://web.archive.org/web/20060410153049/http://listerengine.com/Those of us not wishing to pursue a change in career or not wishing to abandon pursuing our hobby safely will have little option but to drift away, leaving the podium / forum to you and your ilk, the blind leading the blind, and another necessary ingredient in the place in the chain of causality that eventually leads to the inevitable "accident"
I've seen some seriously worrying things here, but that broken flywheel made my asshole pucker up, hairs stand on end and blood run cold, and I'm old enough and experienced enough to know that when things like that happen you do NOT look at the machinery around the flywheel, you look and listen to the people, and decide who you are going to go on shift with, and who is so dangerous you aren't going anywhere near anything they touch, and maybe even is it time to hand your papers in.
I've said it before, I have said at various times in my life "one day you fuckers are going to kill someone" and so far I have never been wrong, much to my regret, and cowardice perhaps that I always jumped ship instead of staying around and trying to steer the tiger.
One day you fuckers are going to kill someone.
SO long, thanks for all the fiche (sic) this is my swansong folks. I may stop by now and again but not logging in and not posting, if anyone wants to contact me off list drop an email to
d a v e n u l l @ b l u e y o n d e r . c o . u k
cya
