Explaining "under the Macrocapas" to foreigners (read: the rest of the world)

[mikenash]

New Zealand, up until the years immediately following WW2, was a largely agraian country and our cities were pretty sparse places

A great many Kiwis lived and worked "on the land" and a farmhouse or farm-worker's house adjacent to the sheep-shearing shed was so common as to be completely invisible.  Often the sheepyards, shearing shed etc, would be accompanied by a few small "holding" paddocks for sheep awaiting shearing or some other process.  Inevitably these houses, sheds & holding paddocks were fenced with a "shelter-belt" of Cupressus Macrocapa (Monterey Cyprus to you Northern Hemisphere blokes)

Fast-forward seventy-odd years and tens of thousands of Kiwis live in "lifestyle block" houses on two or three acre sections carved out from farmhouses left empty by the rural depopulation (from mechanisation) of the 60s & 70s.  Many of those small-holdings are bordered by the original Macrocapa hedge, often three trees deep and offering a sprawling & waterproof canopy up against a fenceline usually only 50 metres or so from the house - an irresistible dumping ground for old tractors, piles of firewood seasoning, dead farm machinery, "spare parts" cars - you name it. 

Thus there is a time-honoured tradition, in rural New Zealand, of parking something that you don't want cluttering the section, the shed or the driveway; but which "might be useful someday" and which is, anyway "too good to throw out"  . . . "under the Macs"

The lower branches also provide a convenient anchor for chain winches, carcass-lifiting swingletrees, front-end-loaders with leaking hydraulics . . . home-made engine-block lifting devices and the like.

So when one comes home with a new CS 6/1 which needs to be lifted off one trailer and kept up in the air for a few weeks before being dropped onto another trailer to be towed to its destination on a concrete pad somewhere else . . . "Under the Macs" is the obvious repository

I paid $500 for this one.  It has, allegedly, "Had the valves and rings done five years ago and never subsequently used . . . "  time will tell.  I suspect if I just buy an Indian pump/line/injector assembly and splash a bit of diesel around it might be a good runner.

I guess we'll see

[mikenash]

  "agrarian" sorry.  I dropped the laptop a while back and, ever since, the "R" button has been reluctant . . .

[listard-jp2]

Nice find, you have made

From the photo's you seem to have an early style cylinder head (two rocker pedestals instead of the larger central rocker pedestal found on CS 6/1 engines). You also have a feeler pin injector also not normally found on CS 6/1 engines.

This would suggest that at some point in this engines past, the cylinder head was replaced (for whatever reason) with one from an early CS 5/1 engine, or even possibly a CS 3/1 engine

[AdeV]

Nice! Any engine suspended like that for any length of time in the UK would soon find itself disappearing, or turning into rust, or even both...

The serial number says it's a late 1946 engine, I'm not sue when they changed the rocker style, the spec number will reveal whether it's an original setup or not. Unfortunately I'm not au fait with the spec plates, I'll have to dig out my David Edgington book to see if that tells us.

[mikenash]

Down here at the Bottom of the World there are many rural places that didn't get electricity reticulated out until the '60s, and many large old sheep properties (not large by Australian or Texas standards, of course) where it wasn't economic to run electricity out to shearing sheds.  So, in the days before transportable generator sets, these engines drove overhead rotating shaft systems with big flat-belt drives

http://blog.topburds.com/top-birds-everyfing/2016/02/mangatoi-station-woolshed.html

The engines were high-hours workhorses, often running ten or twelve hours a day for three months of the year, year after year, and they have typically been maintained by local staff, especially in the early days when many of them were on sites a day or two's ride with a horse and cart from the nearest railhead.

Typically, they may have been apart many times over the years & decades.  I bought a 12/2 a while back off one of these remote stations which only got electricity to its shed two years ago.  I was a '70s machine, but to the chap running the farm it was just "the Lister".  There had probably been two or three engines sitting on that base running the belt drive since the first one in maybe the late '30s?  He said it had   "Shorn 35,000 sheep twice a year for seventy years"

All of which is a longwinded way of saying "who knows what has been done to that 6/1 to keep it going over the decades?"

I have a spare head off a (I think 1939) 5/1 here anyway if needed

Thanks for the comments, guys.  I'm always impressed with the depth of knowledge here

I'm off up to my "project" in a week to get some work done.  It's a "retire in the sunshine" block of land up on our East Coast - no power there, so the Listers can make a contribution I hope.

I made a steel base for a 6/1 and a generator or two a while back that will lift them about 400mm above a concrete floor (easy cranking height), and one of next week's jobs is to pour the first pad for that to bolt down to.  Once that base is shimmed level and bolted down I was thinking to pour a shed floor around it and maybe 50mm above the level of the first concrete pad so that the whole thing is sort of "concreted-in"  We'll see how that pans out.

Cheers

[vdubnut62]

Ah, the stuff we Yanks can only dream of. Listers just growing on trees! Pretty much the same here with old tractors, lawnmowers, trucks, machinery around the barns and sheds. We just call it "out in the old fencerow", 'cuz that's where all the scrub brush and locust, cedar and scrub and pin oak is, growing along the old fence line that sort of camouflages the junk rare pieces of history.

Ron

[dieselgman]

In my case, a chronic collector of anything that seems to have any use at all, I keep a separate property (junk yard) in the country. This keeps the city authorities off my back for the most part, and I still get to keep all my junk... (treasures) - in safe keeping for one day when I will need something, (not so likely).

At least in recent decades I have managed to keep my collecting down to just Lister (and some generator) stuff and have been filling up warehouses of that stuff in Kansas and Alaska. I have to stay away from auctions these days because it has just gotten too expensive to maintain buildings for the purpose of more collecting.

I spend an inordinate amount of time shuffling engines and parts to make more room and am far from being functionally organized at this point. In the past it really didn't matter because I could remember what I had and where it was generally located... but now the old memory is going fast and I cannot remember a lot of stuff. It is now a frequent revelation when I go looking for something and run across lots of other forgotten things in the process. At least it is still fun! 

dieselgman

[LowGear]

Brings to mind the Alcoholics Prayer - Lubed up just a bit.

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I can lug home, Courage to repair the things I can, and the Wisdom to NOT phone my brother with the pickup and NOT hall the rest of the "stuff" home.

Hello.  My name is Casey.  I have a problem with crap.

[mikenash]

It's a fascinating question - hoarding/collecting/accumulating

That sort of hard-to-justify behaviour is part of what makes us human beings instead of just drones in the workforce

Speaking just for myself (although I suspect many on this forum might echo this thought) there's a race on between the useful years of life I have left (however many they be), how much money I need to earn so I don't "retire" in penury, and trying to find the time to get stuff done in those intervening years when I'm spending all my time earning the $$ I'm going to need in retirement, when I hope to enjoy playing with my toys . . . which toys I may not have prepared properly because I was too busy working . . .

My grandkids can inherit the mess lol

Ten or twelve years ago I sold the two-acre property with the big Macrocapa hedges.  It took me weeks of work and many trips to the dump and the use of the biggest skip bin that could be delivered on a truck to clean up 15 years' accumulation of what was mostly junk.  I said "never again" and moved to a smaller place with less space for "treasures"

But I sold that place a couple of years back and am now in a 3-acre property, right next to the two-acre one I sold twelve years ago - with big Macrocapa hedges around three sides and the odd Lister popping up here and there (not to mention the pile of generator components in the shed . .

Worse, I have just bought 11 acres with a big old barn on the property as my "retirement" project - so I can sit in the sun when I'm an old fart . . .

I'll need a couple of CSs there to help with electricity as it's in the middle of nowhere.  But I'm trying to keep it down to a bare minimum  . . .

There aren't any Macrocapas but, looking at the way the Manuka and blackberry grow along the fencelines, there will be plenty of buried treasures for my grandkids to unearth once I am gone  . . .

[dieselgman]

It's a fascinating question - hoarding/collecting/accumulating

Agreed, we live in a throwaway society these days - extremely wasteful.  In some ways, I collect and support the old stuff to buck that trend. In other ways, I have always done it to be able to afford building and doing many other things that otherwise demanded lots of cash that I just never had raising family and surviving an Alaskan lifestyle. In my later years I have managed to build a substantial debt-free business by collecting every piece of Lister hardware, across the continent and abroad, I could get my hands on. I know it has gotten way out of hand (multiple millions in new stock), but also can be viewed as a substantial asset because there is a continuing demand for parts/service/support on this otherwise orphaned and obsolete product line. Once I'm gone, have no idea what my heirs will do - Most likely just junk the lot of it because they have no interest in this sort of thing. Maybe I can find a buyer before I am forced out of the business by old age and infirmity... someone who wants to continue what I am doing... anyone?

dieselgman

[dieselspanner]

Gary,

Don't worry about old age and infirmity, like a lot of guys on here you've managed to make a living doing something you love.

Therefore you don't 'go to work' and no one can shaft you with a mandatory retirement, great ain't it!!

Cheers Stef

[starfire]

New Zealand I think is one of the last bastions of alternative living. I read that in the US, it can be illegal to go without state run utilities, illegal rain water collection, growing of food..... and more recently, I understand the EPA has now banned any further imports of Lister type engines from India?
When I went off grid in the 60s, I was still required to pay a "line charge" from the electric company despite not being connected. The argument then was that they supplied the lines, it wasnt their fault I wasnt using them.
This utter nonsense fortunately ended in the 70s.
Oddly, despite our gubbermnt expounding our clean and green country to a world wide stage, we have no incentives to be green. For an instance, the US and canada has power buy back systems in place. Good luck with a Kiwi attempting to inject any excess power into the national grid and make any money from doing so.
Mike, Reefton, just up the road from me was the first NZ town to get that new fangled electricity, and in Murchison is a very old  private hydro system that has been restored and in all likelyhood still capable of operation if the valves were opened. I visited this recently.
And, rather than macracarpa, we have gorse, much better at hiding those treasures from prying eyes.
 I bought half a town with my eftpos card in 2000, a legacy of coal mining, Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s and eventual abandonment when the seams ran dry in the 40s. It can still happen.
I see some good bargains up there in  in Detroit too....... pity about the water though.