This older topic may be more relevant now that all the Covid shortages are going, no matter whether they are artificially staged or real.

Casting iron requires a lot less technology than one would ever expect. The melting can be done in a cupola furnace, and the molds are "green sand". Many modern folks have built cupola's in their back yard from scrap yard materials. In the old days of steam engines, cupola's were also often assembled from locally scavenged materials. They can be run on coal, coke, or wood charcoal. Coal can be used directly but is internally converted into coke during the run. Lime or limestone is often used as the "flux". You can bet this is the technology most of the Indians are using on the listeroids. It is interesting to note that in the steam engine days before coal came into use, England nearly destroyed it's forests casting iron from charcoal. It takes a lot more charcoal than coal or coke to cast the same amount of iron, although charcoal is a renewable fuel. Charcoal is also easy to make for the backwoods folks.

Green sand casting is also an old art. The sand often scavenged locally and purified with simple water processing. Horse manure was once used as a binder and is believed to be the process used to cast the Liberty Bell. There are many other binders such as starches, cereals, molasses, and natural substances used. The only real requirement is that the binders and additives do not create an oxidizing atmosphere when the molten metal hits the mold. They also must decompose a "limited" amount so the mold can be easily broken away from the casting but remain solid enough to contain the molten metal before it solidifies. The used sand is recycled with limited additions of new additives.

The sand molds are made from patterns that in the old days were usually made from wood, and often hand carved. The wood is usually varnished or painted with something to make it last longer in production. The mold frames can be made from wood or metal. There is a lot of manual labor involved in making sand molds. When duplicating an existing casting, "shrinkage" must be added, so does all machining stock  allowances. This prevents direct pattern making by reverse molding processes unless the duplicated object is "built up" or coated thick enough to allow for the shrinkage and machining. Yes you can make a mold pattern with nothing more than a pocket knife and wood cut off from a tree!

The cupola's are made from metal casings lined with refractory materials. This is the most challenging part for the back woods craftsman. Ordinary concrete will not work and is dangerous. Ordinary firebrick will likely melt as most is only rated for 1800 deg. F. or so and you will be hitting 2500 deg. F. or even a little higher in the cupola. High alumina is what you use. Kaolin clays can be used to DIY make these refractories. The easiest thing to do is order some high alumina castable or rammable refractory from a foundry supply or industrial supply.

You will also need some type of blower. The size depends on the size of the cupola but they are easy to find and can be DIY built and run off any electric motor that has the right HP and RPM.

All of the material handling equipment can be DIY assembled as well. Cupola's can be run as long as you feed materials into the top of them, or in batch runs if you single load them.

There use to be a lot of books about cupola furnaces available. They essentially won the west here in the US. Simply put, if they were not reasonably easy to build and use in "backwoods" type conditions we would not be getting Listeroids from India.

Now the "formulas" for cast iron are very well developed in today's world as metallurgy is a very mature science. However, they were not in the days of the original Lister engines. Back then cast iron "recipes" were more like secret moonshine making formulas, and some of the foundry men likely did make shine on the side in the moonlight. They usually read something like "add x amount of scrap from x metal yard, x amount of pig iron from x source only, x amount of wrought iron scrap from x source" and so forth. Use the wrong materials and you will have hard brittle cast iron that is fragile and not machinable but will last forever if not broken. Use the right formula and you get ductile and machinable cast iron you can make crankcases, cylinders and rings with. Today, cast iron can be made from low carbon steel from scrap yards. Enough carbon to change it to cast iron is naturally added in the melting process. Adding old cast iron castings (broken up) helps too.

I have actually built aluminum, steel melting and heat treat furnaces. They are really not that technically difficult. Casings are welded together, and anyone who has worked cement can deal with installing the refractory linings. Also keep in mind that you need at least 2450 deg. F. to get a minimal casting quality and you can't get that with natural gas, or propane and just a blower. You can get up to about 2300 but that wont work here. You can get that temp if you use a regenerative system like the foundries use but that is more complex than most DIYer's want to deal with and requires expensive high temp aerospace metals, or a large brick chamber switching system. Fuel oil might work theoretically, but again more complex. Most modern steel melter's use arc or induction. While induction is within reach of some of the more educated DIYer's it requires a substantial power source for Lister sized casting work and is not likely well suited for backwoods settings. My goal here is to present some methods that can be used in non-modernized "bush" settings.

And Please, NO TROLLS accusing their intended "prey" as being a troll.

I'll tell you how we use to repair thousands of cast iron bearing and gearbox casings back in the old oilfield days. Simply grind the crack out and run brass into the crack. You have to make sure you grind all of the crack out or it will continue to grow after it is repaired. It takes some skill to run the brass into the crack with an Oxy Acet. torch but when you get the hang of it (like judge Roy Bean) it is fairly easy. Brass is somewhat soft and will tolerate more shock and abuse and is great for water jackets and things that vibrate a lot.  For stronger repairs in bearings I used nickel based spray metal, which takes a lot of skill and experience to apply correctly but will reliably repair the nastiest cast iron. There are many varieties available for different purposes, some are machinable. Brass is also the best way to repair fuel tanks.

All of the good welding rods for cast iron were taken off the market decades ago, I once used them. The stuff they have now days is pure crap.

JB weld and the likes are intended for emergency temporary repairs only.

If I had my old equipment up and running I could do this work, but that may be another year or so.

More nostalgic than anything else but would also be good for emergency emergency power. I.E. You can't get any fuel for your normal emergency Lister power. We had an ice storm once that was so bad you couldn't buy any fuel anywhere as there was no electricity anywhere to power the station pumps. Outages lasted a couple of weeks. Doesn't take but a few days to use up your reserves. If anything really bad happens there won't be any natural gas either to power those inefficient gas generators everyone is being conned into buying. Thanks to the tree huggers (whose tree's are now all burning down), the natural gas distributors are no longer allowed to burn natural gas to power the compressors that send the gas to you the customer. It's all electric now. Texas is a prime example of what can happen, seems the tree huggers got control of things there somehow before last winter. Next thing they'll have to use mule powered compressors with EPA emissions controls on the mules.

While extremely inefficient, steam could get you by until you could get other means back running. After all, you could burn just about anything to "raise steam". Our pioneers had been known to burn dried cow and buffalo chips, and even cook doing that. Not sure I would like my dinner meat smoked like that though.

Six to eight horsepower would be good. Steam engines are a bit "cool" anyway. Steam still remains a good way of heating too, and in that use is just as efficient as some modern means. This gives a double use for the boiler.

Actually some if not all modern engine earing shells still use a layer of babbit over the backing metal it serves to cushion shock loads and provide crankshaft protection. How thick depends on the application. Ford may have had something to do with thin shell development but Henry's Model Ts and As had poured babbitt bearings.
As for pouring an emergency repair bearing it is indeed a satisfactory repair when there is no other option. As an example there are no big end shells available for the Z4 Banfords engines. When I rebuild one the rod goes to a specialist who pours babbitt directly in the rod and adds a shim pack so it can be adjusted down the road if needed. Same would work for a CS type but when replacement shells in every conceivable undersize are easy obained and cheap there is really no reason go another route outside of an emergency repair and try to find Babbitt in your home town, might as well order a bearing as order babbitt.

Actually it is a thin layer of a special aluminum alloy applied over a layer of copper on the soft steel backing shell for most modern shell bearings. Some manufacturers cut corners and do not use the copper under-layer.  The copper under-layer also was once used when babbit was used for the bearing material as it helps the bonding of the babbit to the steel.

You have to appreciate the simplicity and effectiveness of some of the old technologies. With so much of the world going down the toilet now days, we may find ourselves reverting back to some of these older methods in the near future.

Selling my Powerline 24-2 and 20KW Genhead.

Located south of New Orleans.

Message me for details.

Last I knew, south of New Orleans was the Gulf of Mexico. Kind of hard to drive in that direction.

While this topic has aged a little, I'll add my 2 cents. Piston "slap" is a common annoyance in many types of aluminum piston engines. I have an 8/1 and the slap go's away after it warms up. The extra clearance is to allow for more skirt expansion as the engine gets hot, but is annoying in a cold engine. Also the engine may have excessive piston clearance even for aluminum. The noise can be unnerving and sometimes will cause a person to mistakenly look for a serious engine problem that doesn't actually exist. Better to be safe than sorry though.

You can actually knurl piston skirts, or hand stipple them to decrease the clearance. This actually causes more oil to be retained on the piston skirt too. This was an old race engine building trick in the older days. There is a proper way to do this though, so let a machine shop do this.

In my previous post, the idea was to be on the safe side and make sure the knock wasn't from something bad first.

I have far more diesel engines than SI engines. When tinkering with these engines the first thing is to check the injectors to make sure they spray a completely atomized mist with all ports.  I also check the valve train and the compression. If all is well in those area's, the next thing I like to check is the type of smoke the engine makes under a higher load. It should be black without any hints of white smoke. If there is some white smoke, advance the injection timing a little at a time until it just turns all black. I always notice an increase in the "diesel knock" when this is done. Too far advanced is not good either as the engine not only knocks louder, but also generates more internal heat without any gain in power or fuel economy. This shortens engine life. Timing by the book doesn't always give the best performance either. You do have to be sure the engine is in good shape to time by the smoke as a bad injector, low compression, bad valve timing, or poor valve lash setting will also cause white smoke. Some smaller generator engines require you to make custom injector pump timing disks to change the timing. I've done that too, and with very pleasing results.

Now the indirect injection Lister's use a pre-combustion chamber system. There is also another type of system called an "energy cell" which is quite different from the Lister design. While the energy cell system is known to be a little finicky about over fueling, I am suspicious that it would do very well with WVO, better than a normal pre-combustion chamber design. A good experimental project to look into some day.

Well, these engines might be easy enough for one of us to start, but maybe not if the spouse needs to start it while your away for periods of time in the winter, and the engine has no electric starter yet. In addition to that, the engine would stay warmed up if it was simply "idled".

I disagree on the fuel consumption. In spite of a little more blow by, I think the difference would be dramatic. You would definitely want to use an engine with an oil pump though. At slower speeds, combustion would have much longer to complete. So even if compression was slower and ignition was a little lazy, these effects would be canceled out by the longer stroke time giving combustion extra time to do the same job. I doubt there would be any injector dribble with the type used on these engines, even at ultra slow RPM. I think we are largely in the territory of empirical knowledge here, where the only way to know for sure is to test things out in a well designed experiment. Using full synthetic non-detergent diesel crankcase oil would help a lot at slow speeds as well. Does anyone make such an oil! Probably not.

I specified pump diesel as a baseline comparison fuel. It is true that biodiesel, being an ester with methanol, would have a higher cetane and burn better, but with lower BTU's per gallon. WMO and WVO would not be the same unless mixed with generous amounts of pump diesel or Bio.  I always thought it was funny how people would get into making biodiesel to get away from using petroleum oil based products. They didn't realize that all of that methanol they were using in the biodiesel manufacturing process was............ a by-product of oil refining! Sometimes it's made from natural gas reforming. I think the oil Barron's were getting excellent laughs out of that, and were probably actually promoting the use of biodiesel! My late father was a chemical engineer who designed refineries nearly all of his life.

You would be surprised at what you can make diesel and/or gasoline from. The Germans had very little oil reserves during WWII, (except maybe from some nations they conquered) they made most of their liquid fuels from reforming coal. Their processes made far better diesel than gasoline. That might explain why most of their tanks ran on diesel, while most of our's ran on gasoline. Now days, it is theoretically possible to make gasoline, or diesel from almost every drop of a barrel of crude, although no refiner would ever do that due to the extreme costs. There are many installations currently making gasoline and/or diesel from natural gas. Very little fuel is "straight run" anymore.

This is a good time to work out these details. Next time the price of oil goes up, maybe 5 years or so from now, we'll all wish we had alternatives. I am suspicious that the next time the pricing of a barrel of crude goes viral, it will take on biblical pricing proportions. By then, I hope to be mostly solar. Of course, by then, the fed's will probably have figured out how to tax for the use of the sun as well.