Just wanted you folks to know the weather has been knocking my sat system down for hours at a time.  If I disappear for a day or so its' because I'm behind a weather outage.

 The snow is building an inch an hour, the Listeroid is smoother than ever, there's extra fuel in a room heated with hot well water, there's dog food in storage and dead chickens, pig parts, and pizza in the freezer and steaming hot  water in that concrete hole in the ground. 
 Feel sorry for me, please...

Hey folks---

I found a really neat and clean way to add engine oil to my Listeroid and the the others without the invariable drips and spills--- Laundry detergent bottles.  They have a sho nuff drip-proof design with a pour spout that keeps oil where it belongs.
     I rinse them in hot water, let dry, then add a little diesel fuel to rinse again.  They work like a champ and come in different colors for different oils.

 Question for Lister(oid) owners--

It seems the pinion "spud" that the pinion gear spins on is designed to be oiled from the top just like the big end of the rod, but I see by going back to the pictures I took of my brand new engine that the spud was rotated 90% out for that to be the case.
  Has anyone noticed how their engine came out of the crate?  You can feel the oil notch with a short-bent paper clip run around the bevel between the base of the spud and the face of the gear.

I oriented mine with the notch 'up' to catch the oil....how 'bout ya'll?

It's really good to see more and more folks joining up with the group.  I've been online quite a bit recently and have noticed an increase in the number of visitors on the site, too. 

I've been a part of several discussion groups of this type.....people sharing a common *interest*.   A forum of this type can be an absolute TREASURE of knowledge and experience and innovation.  Take a look at 
http://www.smokstak.com/forum/
as a great example, or the microhydro yahoo group.  People from all over the world with a common interest and a quest to know more about it.

In the really successful and interesting and informative groups that common interest is NOT profit.  Think about it, please.

Listeroids and Petterclones have taken over my shop!!

I just wanted to open up a discussion on the mini-Petter engines that are just as neat as the larger cousins.  Fly wheels are flywheels no matter what they're hooked to.

I have a few of these engines and have 'been in the chittlins' of them and MIGHT be able to answer questions if anybody has them.
  I promise, if I 'don't know'  I'll say that FIRST. 

I just replied to Quinn's post on 'cooling the Listeroid' and then notice 'the balancing Guru' from NC has just joined us, so decided to start a new thread for a common Listeroid quirk.....

Quinn---

Great post, THANKS!!   You're right about the width of the cart.  My mounting space wouldn't allow a wide bed...in fact it's so close to the wall now it's just terrible to work on.   To tell the truth, it's scary to think of things wrapped around the flywheel spokes in such tight quarters, too!!

Mine rocks fore and aft....the whole cart wants to slide to the front and back about half an inch.  I built the cart with heavy, but short casters and mounted the engine thinking I could roll it from it's 'running' place to it's 'fixing' place by unbolting it and wheeling it around.  NO way!  

   First I set four half inch lag shields in the shop floor and ran a chain over the cart and put a binder on it to hold it down front and back...that lasted less than a minute.  I then cut angle iron to run across the cart and put turnbuckles to new lag shields and better bolts so the tension would be straight down. ..... Ten minutes...

   I was out of half inch lags shield and it was fifty miles of four tire chains and ice to town, but I finally found a double handfull of high grade 3/8 studs and steel slip expanders in a hammer drill case I didn't know I owned.  New drills too!
      I cut two pieces of  steel bar scrap and bolted them parralel to the cart to the floor with four 3/8" heat-treated studs on each side then welded sections of 3/8 chain to the steel bar.  I held it down with six turnbuckles pulling lenghts of chain across the cart.
    One by one the chain links pulled loose or broke.
    I re-welded the chain links but bolted them first to a better pieces of scrap iron held again with four 3/8" concrete anchors on each side.
  My buddy, Les from Colorado was up here that week and I kept him busy drilling more holes and setting more lags to be SURE it stayed around.   It wasn't going anywhere this time!....

....but it did.

But that time we were watching for nearly an hour trying to see what was loosening first.
   The cotton-pickin'  casters would gradually rotate around as the engine ran,  and the slack from that would propogate into what became a gradually strenthening pile driver that pulled the shields, broke chain, and even pulled a turn-buckle in two.
  SO, I put timbers front and rear to suspend the cart by the ends and take the casters out of play.  Of course my 'cock of head and say, 'this'll be neat'' cart design was such that the props on the ends didn't support it correctly and I had to run a chain around the whole works and winch it together with a come-a-long to make it FINALLY stable.   I ran it that way for two weeks with an occasional weld failure or broken stud.
   It's now mounted flat to the concrete with brackets bolted to the cart and 3/4" anchors I bought military surplus.  They're 12 inches long and use carbide blocks in a wedge arrangement that just don't allow any slack!  THEY are solid.

The Lister/pumphouse building is an 'L' shape with the little portion about six by eight feet and the Lister is mounted dead center of that 'wing'.  The well curb and piping is in the longer, bigger side of the 'L'.  It's a 'built on grade' slab with no footers and  the little side wing has nothing but 1/4 washed gravel under it.  The Lister broke off it's portion of the slab within days and now that end of the building seems to be 'alive'.       At least it seems happy now.

I'm betting it's the flywheels that are WAY out of balance.  They look like they were cast in somebody's Bar B Que pit.  

HERE'S why this forum is so good---  I *thought* mine wasn't too bad until I started reading about people cranking them on the crate bottom!!  I do believe if I'd cranked mine like that it would have chased me out the door and gradually shredded  everything in sight and stomped the residue into mud.

The very *thought* of mounting my engine on rubber tires brings visions of summersaulting Listeroids on a trampoline.    

 Thermosyphon cooling is SIMPLE and it works as reliably as gravity, usually.

As with so much of what I do, I try to design and build something so that IF it doesn't work right the first time it won't take much to change it to something else.  Couple that philosophy with my typical 'design on the fly and be sure to over do it' strategy and the complicated mess of a cooling system I installed on my Listeroid becomes more understandable....hopefully.

My home water system is unusual---the well is hot and mildly artesian.  It flows about ten gallons a minute at 105 degrees all the time, but with very few minerals.  In the  well is a submersible 3HP pump (too big for the Lister) that pumps water up the canyon wall to two 20,000 gallon water tanks half buried in the hillside.  I can pump 2,000 gallons an hour with my 15Kw Onan diesel at a gallon of fuel per hour.   The place was designed for a LOT of water to be used by 25 full-time residents, but with just me an three dogs here I have to let some water leak out (bird watering stations up the canyon) so I can pump new water every week to keep the temperature of the tanks up in the winter.  I like to keep the tanks nearly full all the time. It's the only way I have of fighting fire.

Since I have 40,000 gallons of water at 55 psi available, I decided to run a thermosiphon to waste cooling system in the Lister.  The one I built is considerably more complicated than actually needed, BUT it's set up to run with a self-contained water supply or with auxillery radiators, or with several other set-ups, if needed.

Simply put, the system consist of a 195 degree thermostat installed in the top water outlet of the engine and a circulation tank with a water inlet valve,  an overflow, and a drain.  In use, the engine is filled with water at the same time the water tank is filled.  BE SURE TO DRILL a relief hole in the top rim of the thermostat to allow air to escape upwards so the engine can fill with water.
  A trickle of water is allowed to run into the tank all the time.....five gallons per HOUR is about right for mine.  This water goes out the overflow to waste if it's not needed, but as the water boils off under load there's always a constant supply ready to take it's place.

I've thought of a float valve like a toilet tank fill valve which would add only water as it was needed, but I use the waste water to further dampen exhaust noise and like I said....I need to use some water anyhow so I let it run.

There are many variations on this same theme---care-free cooling of a working Lister, but this one works for me very well.  If you have a reliable source of pressurized water available it's easy to cool an engine using only a ten gallon tank instead of 50 or 60.....in fact, a tank isn't needed at all in it's simplest form.  Just a hose adapter for the bottom intake and a waste hose out the top past the thermostat.  The weep hole in the thermostat means a little water will always be running, but mostly the exhaust water will be surges of occasional 195 degree water.

THere ARE mineral deposits that form in the head and cylinder. Mine are soft silica that blast out with a pressure washer and  pose no problem, but be sure to check the galleys often at first to be sure the precipitates aren't clogging something up.

Listers (as all diesels) are best run hot ....keep the cylinder temps at 185 and the head at 190 and it'll purr.