OK, most of us in here are males, and most of us old enough to have been married, common law or otherwise.
You can spend 5 years each with 5 successive women, and still have a lot to learn about #6.
Listers (can't speak for listeroids cos I ain't seen one) are the same, lemme explain.
If you are a newbie to diesel / stationary engines you are what we might refer to as a virgin, you may know the theory, but.... you may feel that those who are diesel experienced will have a huge lead on you when it comes to understanding a lister, don't be fooled so easy.
Experienced diesel guys get Lister as wrong as anyone else, only those who sit down and look closely at what is there start to gain understanding. The Lister CS 6/1 is
NOT a simple engine, what it is is an incredibly
elegant and
refined engine.
Let's take my mate who has bought the start-o-matic as an example. He has a lot of experience, spent time at sea and all the rest, owns his own dyno for gods sake. He is more than capable of intellectually and engineering wise visualising what the Lister is all about.
When we got back to his place I basically went home and left him to it, with much urging to start the bastard the next day before he went off to work. Why, because a fair proportion of the reason he parted with the cash for a Lister was me.
Take a look at the video he made the next day
http://www.semleystation.com/html/Articles/100_2517.mpgNow go back and watch it again, and ignore the engine, look at his face.
You can clearly see the moment when he "gets" it and the last worries about his purchase disappear.
On these forums he said two things, he was surprised how easily it started, and how large a proportion of all the energy involved was in the flywheels, on the phone to me he said he was surprised how mechanically quiet it was.
This is my point, you would think that none of these things would surprise him, he is after all no stranger to engines or engineering, but BECAUSE he is no stranger to engines or engineering he was surprised. In a working lifetime you are quite unlikely to encounter something that is so refined, so well designed, and such high quality THROUGHOUT as a Lister CS 6/1. Everything you worked on has compromises, so that is what you become used to.
Even the quality of the lettering cast into covers far exceeds what you would expect from a custom made sign, I, though I say so myself, am a bloody good engineer and yet I honestly cannot think of a single improvement that can be made to a CS 6/1.... how about a crosshead to take the torque off the piston and barrel? well it will absorb more power and the piston and barrel are good for 100k hours anyway thank you very much, so no improvement to be made there.
EVERY LAST MINUTE DETAIL of the Lister CS 6/1 is the product of refined design, every last thing is made as well as it can be.
The sheer elegance of driving the injection pump and oil pump off the camshaft in the way Lister did it cannot be beaten.
Every last design detail is there for a reason, and the reason was always quality and reliability, not lowered cost.
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For you americans with clones you have a double problem, there is nothing there to indicate that what you are working on is supposed to be world beaing engineering quality, it just looks like a simple and crude diesel engine.
Lister were building these engines of this quality, such as mine, during the privations and shortages post ww2, and americans have no idea how fundamental and far reaching those shortages were, rationing ended in 1954...
and yet the quality was still superb, because the one thing you can't get short of (unless you stop training and wait a generation) is engineering excellence, nobody at the Lister factory treated their engines like Fords, or anything like that, and here is the root of the problem.
If you approach a lister or even a lister clone like it is just another diesel engine, it will never reward you, you must approach it as a very large and massive swiss watch. It does not matter how massive the components are, you can still fettle them to a tolerance, finish and balance worthy of a watchmaker, and
IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY TAKE THAT LONG.
I have ground crankshaft journals by hand, I asked when taught why I should bother learning this, when there was no shortage of machine shops with specialist crank grinding machinery. I was told two answers, one, you aren't always within easy reach of one, and two, you are rarely in reach of one that can grind to true precision and quality.
point two was later proven to me when I started tuning BSA singles, one of the acronyms for BSA was Bastards Siezed Again, because you could get maybe 2000 miles out of a bottom end when you tuned them, so then I started doing them by hand, and got 10,000 miles out of a bottom end, and a motor that suddenly felt like silk.
The real kicker is I could do a journal in a morning, even one that was 5 thou out of round to start with, which was quicker than taking the job to the machine shop.....
Nowadays with CNC and such like most of us have access to true precision machinery, but we will still take our crank to bobs grinding shop where bob will grind what he sees as some old piece of shit crankshaft. I won't, not with a Lister, or even a Listeroid, I'd take it to my local machine shop and talk the job through with the machinist, who given half a chance would love to be able to show off his skills on a piece of quality material.
Sure, it costs a bit extra, but not much, and here is the kicker.
I'll probably never see that journal again, because it will stay assembled and running sweet for decades. My dad had a start-o-matic set in the mid eighties that he had rebuilt as an apprentice in the fifties because the shed roof gave way, whacked the oil bath and sent a splurge of oil into the cylinder which hydrauliced it, twenty years later he bought the set off the owner, hadn't been stripped since, I was dying to strip it but was never allowed to.
I'll lay money you can give a listeroid crank to a skilled machinist and get near as dammit Lister quality out of it. And that goes for every other part too, PROVIDED the machinist / engineer is AIMING for big swiss watch quality in his approach.
Your Lister is not some clunky old single cylinder "agricultural" (meaning crude) simple diesel, it is a fine and elegant piece of precision engineering, even if that is hidden behind clunky indian castings screaming to get out.
Andy T19 has a contact near him who does listeroids, I predict if he gets involved in andy's rebuild the quality of his listeroids will suddely shoot up, because he too will "get it" just the way my mate did on that video above, go and watch it again...
