Being a born and bred, dyed in the wool, smoker advocate (diesel engine freak), I had the opportunity in Canada to take a diesel Smart for a ride... OMG... it might have given us decent mileage but DAMN, was it underpowered... 70mph was a longgggggg way down the road... might work as a metro buggy but on the highway.... no, no, no... as for the gas I've heard the same thing.. mileage wasn't what the owners expected it to be... think I'll keep riding my Wing.

Doug,

My, settle down! I am one of the left overs from the orignial Lister then HSDE corporationis of England. In the sixties we had a substantial number of issues with all the Indian manufactured engines... their marketing was... well... innovative. They went so far as to sell internal items stating they were equal or better to Lister... a lie.
As for the internal issues, there is no corporation on the planet to rival Lister's technology and Engineering... at best any clone can do is copy it using inferior materials. As for the DI/IDI issues, leave it to the people who engineered them for a living... The concepts of the two have been hotly debated and to this day, the IDI loses hands down... even as a slow speed engine... The largest engines used in ships (manufactured by Hyundai of which manufactures 3 out of every five cargo ships on the seas as well as being the largest manufacturer of horsepower on the planet) uses a DI two stroke at a whopping 61 RPM. Do not underestimate this firm.
While finding favor in specific applications (Kubota, for one... Perkins for another, Yanmar, etc.) variants of the Ricardo MK-V precombustion chamber (no doubt the most prolific IDI ever built) will be around for years to come... the reason being: The engineering is already done, cheap to puchase the engineering as it's antiquated and it's easy to manufacture.
As for India's manufacturing, your threads speak for themselves... if these were Listers remanufactured, 99% of these issues wouldn't exist. Those of us who were employed as engineers and worked with and around countless thousands of these engines know their worth. I hold nothing against anyone who loves to tinker.. i believe it to be grand but the truth is and will remain... Sir Richard Lister owned the firm responsible for building the most robust, the toughest and most durable engines on the planet.
I did look at India's engines... strangely, nothing has changed since the sixties... nothing!
If you're after durability, head for Lancaster PA and talk the farmers out of one of their 6/1's or 12/2's, go through it and let it run... then tell me crow about your Indian Clones.

Excellent posts, Gents!

Valve clearance a biggie... lose guides, carbon on the valve face, recessed valves (not good), cutting the head (not good)... You know, I'm here with a bunch of tinkerers! Kudos! I couldn't leave anything alone either... must be why my museum of engines still run as they did when they were manufactured... hey, was fun!

For what it's worth, most valve issues come from bad cams.. no heat treat, bad grinds, etc, soft tappets, improperly ground tappets, poorly adjusted valve clearances, poor materials or overheating... the latter of which creates the least issues.

If it's a depressed valve issue, buy a couple of new valves and have the head machined for an inserts and bring the valves back down where they belong. Compression and swirl are why the engines work... a depressed valve creates turbulence issues... cutting the head creates even more issues to contend with.

BTW, before I forget, Lister had (and still has) a natorious habit of placing the bore of the tappet off to one side of the cam. The reason being: By incorporating the offset tappet guide bore, the tappet was more so forced to spin thereby allowing great wear characteristics.

Gotta love the issues, creativity and BS...

We live in Arizona as well... in as much as it's hot here, the original Listers were developed to tolerate 125F temps while pulling continous rated power.  If you have radiator issues, try using drum cooling... works great!

Bars... I wonder how many leaks have been plugged by this stuff....... in all honesty, it's about as good as it gets without a major tear down... and here I am, taught and trained to do it right... forgot about the stuff.

Gentlemen,

Burning drain oil isn't a problem... nor is filtering it... but please, don't use toilet paper or papertowel filters... honestly, go the local parts store or www.northerntool.com and look under hyd hardware and purchase a great 15gpm filter for just a few bucks. As for the carbon particulates, a centrifuge is the only way to get it out of the fuel. The carbon doesn't actually hurt anything internally as carbon is an extremely good bearing material... but smoke?  WHEW!

bill

You can't go from an IDI to a DI engine without a substantial amount of engineering. For what it's worth, an IDI is a less efficient engine however an IDI can burn a lesser quality of fuel than a DI. The reason being, an IDI burns at a slower rate thereby allowing the heavies within the fuel to ignite creating a longer burn, augmenting cylinder pressure which in turn produces mechanical energy.

If you use a pintle nozzle, the piston, providing there's enough material can be machined accordingly however you'll need to rivet a steel swirl chamber upon the top of the piston (kind of a neat little washer with a hole in it then curled). If you use a multi hole nozzle, machine work becomes a very technical issue of which can be done... problem will be finding a proper nozzle to do the job.

As for the balancing issues, the crank can be machined and balanced to operate with an aluminum piston. Another option would be to have an aluminum piston machined to weigh with the iron piston it replaces (in round numbers, 3 times the mass in aluminum to equal the weight of iron). One issue might arise... ring lands... iron has a far better working strength and greater durability than aluminum however you can overcome this by making a two piece piston... the top of steel or iron and the skirt of aluminum... not uncommon.

Originally Lister pistons actually had a cast iron insert held in place with the aluminum poured around it in the mold... later, other than those used in turbocharged engines, the iron insert was eventually omitted. What the iron did do for all the engines is offer a greater degree of durability to those who loved to start the engine on ether... BAD BAD idea... There are a myriad of other ways to start these engines well below zero without the adverse effects to the internal working parts. If I had a dollar for every engine I saw destroyed with ether, I'd be... yeah!

Anything is possible but I strongly suggest you leave it as you purchased it... Lister's engineering, if it were followed in the clones, is as tough as it gets...

Gentlemen,

Some of you are scaring me.

Bill

Gentlemen,
Lister, since the begining of time, looked at oil pressure for what it needed to be... not what most thought it should be and accordingly, 7psi was common for nearly every engine they built (turbocharged engines are the exception) so no matter what or which filter you use, it's not like you can hurt anything within the engine. Also, cloned Listers are exactly that... they don't need hybrid anything!With the exception of the JAS, HRS and several of the S series 4 cylinders, nearly everything Lister made incorporated a jerk pump (a piston acting on a lobe on the cam) installed on 1,2, and 3 cylinder engines. Sounds strange? Not really as every Lister had such generous main and rod journals. As per the Engineers: Keep the journals wet enough to lubricate and toss oil onto the cylinder walls. It's also an oil consumption control device. Honestly, the journals need not be flooded as the journals are large, capable of far more BMEP than these engines are capable of. They simply don't need to dissapate excessive amounts of heat. Add to it, the babbit overlay, high pressure oil can do more damage than good. At any rate,  and these engines were designed to run at least 20,000 hours so please don't worry about oiling issues... Synthetics aren't necessary as the clones aren't of the quality Lister manufactured however oils such as Rotella Valvoline Cummins, etc would serve the purpose well.
If you're installing an oil filter, use an extremely heavy copper tube (not air conditioner tubing) as per the HR range of engines. If you're installing a remote filter use hyd. hose... it's your investement... besides, wouldn't you prefer sleeping well at night instead of worrying whether or nor not a tube is going to crack?
Bill