It is possible that the newer Ashwamegh gears are better - they have certainly received enough complaints about the old ones!

The thing that scares me about Red Green is that I can see, in everything he does, a grain (ok, maybe a bit less) of a good idea.....I thiink it's just me, I need help.......

John F.

The aluminium gears are fine, unless you have a machine that has too little lash on either the crankshaft side or the camshaft side.  In that case it will wear very quickly - I put one in a Vidhata 12/2 and it was worn out in about 400 hours.  I think the problem with (some of) the twins is that the pilot hole that goes through the crankcase for the idler gear is out by a few thousands of an inch and that causes excessive strain on the gears, which contributes to premature wear and failure.  Ally that with a poorly cast idler and failure is pretty inevitable.  I have been toying with the idea of making an offset shoulder on the idler bolt so the lash could be adjusted.  Need a "round tuit" though! 

Everyone should go inside their engine and mark the crakn and cam gear placements to make sure you can replace an idler in th event of catastrophic failure.  If that is not done, there is a pretty easy way to get correct timing within a tooth or so.

I also use an hour meter attached to the genhead.  I got the meter from the local John Deere dealer, it is a standard tractor part.

WVO is easy to use in a Lister.  The only thing you need to remember is that the oil has to be reasonably hot when it gets to the injectors.  That is pretty easy to do, you can either run a line from the water jacket in the engine through the oil tank, or have the engine and oil tank in an insulated building that keeps it pretty warm.  I do the latter, when the engine is running it gets up to about 90 - 100F in there, easily enough to pre-heat the oil.  As for the dual tanks, I actually have 3, one for diesel or bio and two for WVO.  The fuel lines run down the side of my water jacket lines into a common three into one brass fitting (you can find them in the air tools section of your local hardware store).  Make sure this fitting is close to the engine so when you do a change over to dino/bioD it doesn't take too long. I strip off the onboard filter and use filter in each line to make the change over quicker.  I have two WVO tanks so that I can be running on one while I fill the other and give time for the oil to settle - that is probably overkill because I filter the stuff pretty well  but I have the space. 
if you need to know anything else I'd be happy to give you a more detailed explanation.

Hi guys;

Yes, I do sell these engines in Canada and yes, I have over 3,000 hours on a 12/2 using WVO.  My buddy (the one with the dog) has over 4500 hours on his 12/2 on WVO.  He is indeed off grid and has been for 8 months, as previously mentioned.  I would have been right there along with him, but I had some serious problems with my engines.  The 12/2 (Vidhata) ran for about 2,000 hours then broke a camshaft.  A real horror story to fix that!  Then the 25/2 (Ashwamegh) cracked the cam gear - the webbing on the gear was too thin and yes, there are index marks stamped in the wheel.  I am in the process of replacing those two engines (a 20/2 and a 6/1) with ones from Joel Koch.  They should be up and running in the next month, and I expect to be joining the off-grid bunch by midsummer.  Sometimes, sh.. just happens.  But the good thing - I KNOW how to fix a broken Lister!

Cheers,

John F.