Anybody ever try one of the "ceramic" coatings on the piston top and cylinder walls ?  Or would that still be too much mass and continue to suck the heat away ?

http://www.dieselnet.com/tech/engine_coat.php#intro
 DIY kit:
CBC2 POWERKOTE  (scroll down to it)
http://www.techlinecoatings.com/hi-performance/bs-internal-engine-coatings.html

Anything you can do to slow heat transfer to the mass of the engine from the combustion process will increase engine efficiency.  Remember, our Carnot-cycle engines all work by making hot AIR, not hot metal.  I also intend to ceramic coat the piston top, combustion chamber face, valve heads and (particularly) the precombustor chamber on my 6/1 if I ever get the thing built.

The master plan is to build the set, run it in, measure a baseline BSFC at a couple of different loads, then take the bits of interest off, ceramic coat them, and retest.

And yes, running the coolant jacket hotter than boiling point is also guaranteed to increase combustion efficiency, because the delta-T (and thus rate of heat transfer) between engine mass and combustion is decreased.  The good news is that you can theoretically run an all-iron engine very hot.  The bad news is that it's really hard to regulate/limit engine temperature much above about 15 PSIG, which only gets you to an operating temp of 240F or so in non-boiling mode.  Something tells me that it's going to be very hard to get the cylinder block and head to stay watertight at anything above that kind of pressure.  It's fun to look at a steam table and consider running the thing at something like 30+ PSIG though.

I know it's an old thread, but I thought I'd put in my $.02 anyway.

I had to deal with this exact problem.  I bought a Metro 6/1 and tore it down, then moved to another state and went back to school, so had no time to finish the build and get a generator running.  Then I went and bought a house up on top of a hill with terrible power utility reliability.

I needed a generator, I needed it to be reliable, electric start (so the wife could start it), and I needed it quickly.  I also needed to spend as little as practical on it.  The doctors on either side of us put in turnkey auto-start 10+ KW LPG units.  None of my cars cost that much, so I certainly couldn't afford that solution.  I also didn't want more than about 7 KW capacity because I wanted good efficiency and no wet stacking.

My friend with an addiction to large green trucks formerly owned by the US Military hooked me up with an ex-US Army MEP-002A for a very reasonable price.  It's a 2 cylinder four-stroke air cooled Onan design rated at a nominal 5KW, which sounded a little marginal, until I found out that the 5KW rating was at 10,000 ft MSL, 100% duty cycle, and 80% power factor.  The civilian generator with the same power head was rated at 8KW.  It's not auto-start, but it is electric start and comes with handy operating instructions on a metal plate atop the control cubicle.  Also has a neat output switch capability that gives you the choice of 120V/1ph, 240V/1ph or 208V/3ph.  Lots of people use these (and their larger 10KW sibling) to run 3 phase equipment in shops instead of paying the power utility to run a 3 phase feed.

It's rather loud, but it's also completely indestructable - The design has exactly two faults: 1: there is no overcurrent protection on the field circuit, so you can cook the voltage regulator if you idle it instead of just let it spin up to near 60 Hz as it is supposed to, and 2: the injection pump is a little fragile if the engine is allowed to sit and grow gunk in it.  That's it.  Fuel economy is pretty good: about 0.5 USG/hr at rated power.

That's what sits beside the shed waiting for the next ice storm.  When i get the listeroid put together it'll be a cogen system, and will be expected to provide supplemental heat and power from waste oil.  There's no easy way to do this with the military generator as it is air cooled and is (a little) pickier about its fuel.

The listeroid is a toy with practical applications that forms part of my long-term energy management strategy.  The military generator is reliable standby power here now.  I don't plan on getting rid of either one.

Lucky dog...

It's not precisely on topic, but worth mentioning - if you consider the conversion losses from mechanical energy to electrical and then back to mechanical when you have no more than six horsepower sitting around (postulating a CS one cyl here), then going direct mechanical for work makes more sense.

I'm thinking about putting a line shaft in my shop.  I'd prefer to use more modern belt technology than flat belts (which are a pain and inefficient), but the idea is the same - the losses of spinning a shaft on ball bearings have to be a lot less than double conversion of mechanical energy.

Yes, one can run the air conditioner with a Lister and a generator, but why not just run a refrigeration compressor with a belt from the Lister and cut out the middleman?

I'll pitch in one idea that Amarbir might have missed:

Technical fuel consumption is always measured in the laboratory by mass of fuel.  This is true of wood, coal, diesel, gasoline, methane, etc.  You burn so many grams or KG of fuel and get so much heat (or power) out.  The reason for this is that the fuel's energy density is measured by unit weight - a gram of a particular diesel fuel makes so many calories of heat energy when burned.

But it's difficult to measure the weight of a container with a hose coming out of it, so the first thing the scientist does is take a sample of the fuel and find its density at standard temperature, and then calculate the energy density of a litre of fuel from that.  It is very easy to measure the amount of ml of fuel consumed from a marked container, so this is the way it is usually done.

Fuels vary both in their density (grams/litre, usually about 850 for diesel fuel) and in their energy density (cal/litre, Mj/litre, diesel usually about 34 Mj/litre).  Back when I worked in a lab, we had to measure a sample of fuel from each batch to determine just what it was so that we knew what its characteristics were.  We would also run the fuel in an engine of known properties and verify that it behaved as the laboratory results and manufacturer numbers predicted.

It's important to compare fuel consumption results with known loads and known fuels, or you don't really know just what has changed to cause a different result.

Hi Mates ,
 I am it again lol .Would Like To Know How To Fine Tune a Listeroid to Perfection .Some Things i Need To Learn .

1 : Balancing
2 : Tuning Piston For Clearance
3 : Perfectly Setting Up The Values Etc .

          Other Parameters You Can Help And Guide Me Better To  .

There are high tech ways to balance an engine, but this works about as well as anything for something like a 6/1
http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=35.msg4858#msg4858.  If you want to see more about the theory and practice of balancing, read the whole message thread.

Piston clearance is pretty easy - you measure it with a piece of soft lead or clay.  Be sure to measure on both sides of the bore as the crankshaft may not be square to the bore - this is fixed by moving the crank bearing mounts or by shimming the cylinder unevenly.  Here are some threads about piston clearance: http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=5303.0, http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=438.0, http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=186.msg2078#msg2078.

Values or valves?  The first thread on piston clearance covers most of the values to  use.  Valves are pretty simple to set for clearance.  The problem is that many of the Indian rocker arms are very poorly finished and do not work the valves in the correct manner.  You can search here for several discussions of this.  Hotater's build of his FuKing is the worst one I've seen.

Re badness of solvents: they're all bad in different ways.

Organo-halides like perchloroethylene, triclhloroethylene, and the infamous carbon tetrachloride are all pretty bad news for your liver.  I hurt myself with TCE and no gloves back when I was young and foolish.  My liver enzymes eventually went back up to normal levels (I was in a job that included a full tox panel every six months), but it took about five years after a summer of exposure to the stuff.  Now I'm quite careful not to get any of that class of solvent on my skin - it goes through it quite well.  Neoprene gloves are quite helpful for this sort of thing.  There's also an inhalation risk, of course, but if you have any sense, you use it outdoors, so contact is the more dangerous problem.  In the longer run, several of these compounds are known carcinogens, so limit total exposure, and give your body a rest of a week or more between exposures if you get a hole in a glove or something like that.

On the other side of the ring we have aromatic hydrocarbons.  Benzene, toluene, xylene, and naptha (which is a distillate soup) are typical.  Many of these are carcinogens as well (particularly benzene and naphthalene), but don't have the liver hazards associated with them.  That doesn't make them safe, exactly, and they're vastly more flammable than the chlorocarbons, which is why they aren't used much as industrial solvents anymore - things that kill workers in five minutes in a plant fire get banned a lot faster than things that take decades to do the deed.

Modern low-VOC pump gasoline acutally has relatively little aromatic hydrocarbon content - EPA hates the things, so they're on the way out - replaced with branched aliphatics like iso-octane.  There's no lead either, of course, unless it's avgas.  It's distinctly possible that sticking your arm in pump gasoline is now better for you than sticking it in xylene or a chlorocarbon.

If I had one to choose, it'd probably be something like n-hexane.  It's highly flammable and has a high vapor pressure, but it's a great solvent and is pretty cheap and not particularly toxic.  Winter-blend gasoline should be close to that as well.

When I'm cleaining my own stuff, I usually use something like Stoddard solvent/varsol/kerosene initially in the parts washer, then, if it's sensitive, I rinse it with brake cleaner to strip the residual oil off.  Sometimes parts go into the dishwasher - the detergent plus washing soda does a great job on kerosene residue.

For electrical stuff?  I'd take it apart, find somebody running a motor shop, and see if they have an evap tank, dip tank, or something similar.  An evap tank with the right chlorocarbon in it will solve your problem, and because you're not doing the cleaning, you're not getting the exposure.  Don't know where such a motor shop is?  Call the local safety-kleen distributor...