Domestic Listeroid

[n2toh]

Seeing as half the cost of a new roid is the shipping, could a domestic copy compete if the maker was to employ modern manufacturing practices, and material substitutions?

[hotater]

Cast iron and the EPA are joined at the hip......if you DON'T cast iron you don't have to deal with the EPA.  Most folks in the USA think that's a good trade.

I'd sure love to see it.  It would be a natural for the son of a foundry owner to branch out, but to start from scratch would be like trying to open an oil refinery....you'd need a Black Belt in Bureaucratic BS and millions of dollars to start up, but to tack on an engine shop to something already pouring iron would be fairly cheap to do.

In the Provo Utah area there are several possibilities....Geneva Steel Corp. is dead and being dismantled and there are many symbiotic businesses in the area that are looking to take up the slack.  Casters of manhole covers and pipe and fittings are already there and doing business, all it takes is someone with excess foundry capacity and the willingness to take a risk.  There's enough scrap left over from Geneva's sixty years in business to supply the world with Listers.   

[n2toh]

That was kind of my point to not use cast iron, but you bring up a good point Gerdau Ameristeel in Perth Amboy is just a few miles from me.

I was considering for a start importing the rotating assembly and maybe the head. Everything else would be made locally.

[Mr Lister]

Guys,

It's a nice thought to think of US steel and iron workers pouring crankcases for Listeroids, but it just ain't gonna happen.

Georges CD has some cool pictures of Listeroid crankcases being poured and machined in India. They cast about 50 at a time and the moulds look like little graves dug into the sand of the foundry floor.

This work is very labour intensive and for a start, nobody gets out of bed in the US for under $5 per hour.

Our traditional industries have packed up and gone East, and there's very little that we can actually do about it.

I would love to get hold of Lister price-list from 1987 to see what they actually cost in the UK when Lister finally stopped making them.


Ken
 

[n2toh]

Mr Lister

I totaly agree with you, but what I was trying to get at was we need to find a way to buuild them for less money, that pretty much eliminates metal casting of any kind. Remember metal is not the only building material on this planet.

[Mr Lister]

N2OH & List

Casting is one of the cheapest process in the manufacturing industry. It has been used extensively since the 13th century, and hugely exploited in Victorian times. Parts were cast so that they avoided a whole lot of extra machining.

Cast iron is virtually the cheapest metal on earth  (the planet's made of it FFS!).

If you want to reduce the cost of the Listeroid, you have to either reduce the material cost, reduce the number of machining operations, reduce the labout costs or make more of them.

Since there are about 15 manufacturers in India, although this makes for healthy competition, it means that 10 companies are wasting their time producing crap that just won't sell to the West.

The way to make a cheaper Listeroid is to consolidate manufacture to perhaps 5 large manufacturers, invest in new tooling and CNC production equipment and get a quote from the Chinese to produce the labour intensive parts instead!

Remember that it is for truly anachronistic reasons that there are still 15 manufacturers making legacy Listeroids in India.  Its for the same reason that the Philipines have a back-street motor industry making parts for Wilys Jeeps.

Manufacturing came to China about 30 years after India, so China has leap-frogged the old Lister designs, and gone straight for a cheaper to build, lighter and more powerful design based on a copied Yanmar.

The only thing that drives modern manufacturing in the Far East is the ability to make the product smaller and lighter and cheaper so that you can get more of them into a shipping container.

One example is a small throw-away "suitcase" generator. The old model used to weigh 45lbs, then someone had the bright idea of building the alternator into the flywheel and ditching the alternator and governor and replacing it with a mosfet inverter to maintain frequency and sinusoidal waveform regardless of the engine speed.   

The result is the generator is 2/3rd the size and weighs 28lbs.  That means 1.5 time more fit into a shipping container and it uses less material in manufacturing. Yes its throw-away crap, but its what the World seems to want these days.


Rant over


Ken

[GuyFawkes]

manufacturing costs

I remember being told, many years ago, that it cost about the same to make any "lung" (eg piston / barrel / rod / crank / head ) pretty much irrespective of size and materials, it was the machining that cost the time and money.

perhaps this has shifted away from that nowadays, but I can still see that there is little cost difference between making a CS and a D lister

the real difference comes in marketing, per ton of shipped good you get twice the BHP, and BHP is the new selling point.
(not wanting to start that argument here as well)

[mcinfantry]

i know the owner of Pearce Foundry, Inc in Prairieville, LA. they cast gravel pumps, which are much larger than any lister engine.  i wish i knew more about the listers. they would be interested in doing anything, that makes money.

[trigzy]

Those little inverter generators sure are nice for taking camping etc, if you're just charging up cell phone batteries or running a small drill, they're hard to beat.  After all, I cant tow the boat and the listeroid at the same time!  You can get the Chinese to build anything, as long as you've got quantity.  Dont worry, they'll mess up the paint as well, you'll never know it didn't come from India!  I'm curious as to what else you would use other than cast iron.

Steve