Armstrong Siddeley AS1 Diesel Engine

Single cylinder 11 horse power diesel engine from the 1960's with a 5 KW generator, this engine will run on waste restaurant cooking oil to produce cheap electricity used to heat my shop next winter.

Is it really worth bothering with though ?

I kinda feel like i made that mistake years back. I was out hitting the yard sales and came upon a barn that hadn't been opened in the last 50 years. The owner was a summer person who was a well to do mechanical engineer that died back in the 70's. He left the property to his daughter who in turned passed the place to her daughter. Nobody had any interest at looking inside the barn till they decided to clean the place out before listing the property for sale.

Opening that door was like walking into a time capsule. There were all these different machines in pristine condition. I picked up a 3kw Onan gen head from the 1960's that was intended to run off the belt driven PTO of a tractor.

Gawd ... that thing was built to run constant duty for a very long time. They don't build them like that anymore.

I guess i was just being sentimental about the past. It sat in the shop for years but i never really did anything with it. It just wasn't practical to meet my needs in this day & age. Three kw @ 110 volts wouldn't even start the submersible well pump.

In the end ... i just gave it to a fulla who still had a working Onan with his promise not to scrap it out for the copper inside.

Fast forward seven years and i helped him offload his Onan to the junk pile in 2023. Man ... that thing was as heavy as all get out. I asked him why he decided to take it out of service and he said it was two things. He had forgotten how to work on it and repair parts gradually stopped being available after Onan was bought out by Cummins diesel back in the 90's.

I dunno ... maybe some things are best left in the past. You can't go back so you gotta move forward.

Hills this is a compression ignition engine with direct injection ( mechanical injection ) no electronic parts, no magneto, coil , condenser or spark plugs.

Had a conversation the other day very similar in respect to how your feeling about the older equipment telling my friend us old timers will soon be gone, years ago having acquired an old engine like to one I recently purchased would have given you bragging rights at the coffee shop.

The previous owner had a fairly high asking price, had it up for sale six months or more being the only one showing an interest I bought it for less than scrap value. Just because I'll be saving this engine from the scrap pile.

On another note I had sold my Alice Chalmers 720 tractor with the front end loader, the fellow who bought it not being mechanically inclined has let the tractor sit in a field for the past two years just because he does not know how to install a new battery. Bought it back for a third of what I had sold it at.

Last October did an estate cleanup a hoarder, a reefer trailer full of vintage Triumph's, BSA and a Russian Ural with a side car, all of which sold at what I consider fire sale prices. Sad no one has an interest in preserving history. I did not keep one for myself.

Was plenty of stuff that caught my interest and all I kept for myself was the large Ingersol Rand compressor on a 120 gallon tank.

This track loader, part of the estate which consisted of five property's all loaded with treasures.

I dunno ... i guess i just try to be practical minded about things. I was a self employed small time contractor for a good many years. The meter is running when you're on the job. You have to be able to rely on your tools and power equipment. Downtime easily costs you $ 300.00 - 500.00 per day. Commercial fishing is big business in this tiny out of the way place to the order of tens of millions a year. It's the same thing with downtime but even more so. You're in a world of hurt if you're out on the bay,something on your boat fails, and a storm comes up. We have a memorial to all the fishermen who never returned home to their families. It's a sad day when we have to add another name to the list.

The mentality here is that you're really better off with up to date equipment. It's more reliable. It's safer. It's more fuel efficient ,and there's a lower environmental impact.

This global warming thing .... it's looking awfully real to us. The waters in the Gulf of Maine have been heating up faster than any other body of water on the planet. The lobster fishing that we rely so heavily upon for our economic survival is slipping through our fingers as the lobsters gradually migrate Northward into cooler waters.

The storms that routinely come through in the late fall /early winter are more intense now. We had a couple of back to back storms that hammered the snot out of us a month or so ago. The damage caused all up and down the coastline was like we've never seen before.

That sort of brings us back to the generator thing. Power outages have become pretty common. Sometimes we're out for a week or more. I went out and bought a new machine a few years ago. Thing one is that it's been very reliable. Thing two is that it only uses .3 gph and can produce up to 10kw @ 220 volts. That fuel efficiency is important. Figure 8 gallons of super non-ethanol / day ? That still works out to over $ 400.00 / month for electricity.

I'm grateful for what i do have but i'm also looking to the future. My longer term vision for an auxiliary power supply is going to be solar with a hefty battery backup system.

Just my thing ... but i say you gotta keep moving forward and change with the times.

It keeps you young.

I've got a bit of experience running generators on gas, diesel, and propane. I've had all three kinds over the last 30 years. They were all good in their own fashion and they all had their downsides as well. It's a long story.

The Generac portable i'm currently running has plenty of output for the times when it's needed. The thing is that most of the time it only has to idle along a 3600 rpm to meet demand. It will run about 18 hours on a full tank. I would expect it to consume 1 gph + at it's full rated of load of 8 kw but it's never been there. Not even close.

Regular 87 octane ethanol blended gas is okay to use. I just prefer to use the 90 octane non-ethanol in all of my small engines. The ethanol blend is fine for fuel injected engines but it's destructive to carburetors if used for any length of time. Additionally ... i've seen it begin to undergo phase separation after 30 days in storage even with a fuel stabilizer added.

Diesel is a much safer fuel but it's not good in cold weather. That would be especially so with a simple diesel like the one pictured above. No glow plugs or block heater ? You would need a really big battery to crank it hard enough to build up enough heat to ignite the fuel in the cylinder. With the wintertime temps in Canada ... it might not ignite at all. That ... or the fuel would gel on you. Diesel mixed with cooking oil would be even worse in the cold. You probably wouldn't want to run that below 40 deg F.

An old diesel can be loud and the exhaust is pretty disagreeable.

Most whole house battery backups are lithium sealed batteries these days. Interesting side note ... the new Ford f-150 lightning has a factory option now. You can plug your truck in to charge up your electric truck batteries from utility power as you normally would. You can also plug your truck into your house to run everything when the power goes out.

Propane to run my generator on even the coldest days running for hours on end was never an issue. Gee ... i could go out there to start it at 0 deg F. and it would fire right up on the first or second pull. Way better than gasoline or diesel in that regard. The trick to having it run well in the cold is to run the numbers and design your propane tank installation correctly from the get-go. A 20 lb BBQ sized tank ? Not gonna happen. Three -100 lb. propane cylinders pigtailed together on each side of the regulator ? No problem.

If i did not have a good supply of waste cooking oil, propane or natural gas tapped into my home supply would be my choice for standby generator.

I'm not yet entirely sold on solar, EV's or the hybrids.

I hear ya. All this new stuff ... it's kind of upsetting. The world is changing all around me. I'll be darned if i'm gonna lug a cell phone around with me all day long. I really don't see the need of it. The reception is spotty around here anyway. The younger generation ? It's become a standard thing with them.

The hybrids have been around long enough to have proven themselves. Some get 50 - 60 mpg. That's pretty good.

I'm wary of the all electric EV's though. Lots of good reasons to not embrace them too quickly here. Grrrr .. due to some shady legal maneuvers ... they may start forcing people to buy them here in Maine by 2035. The DEP was set to make a ruling on that last month but they had to cancel the meeting because a storm had torn through and knocked out the power. Irony of ironies. I had to laugh my a$$ of at that one.

Anyhow ... there are a lot of big changes going on all around. The Pepsi Cola company started changing it's eighteen wheeler fleet of delivery trucks to electrics back in 2017.It might be too long before the majority of vehicles on he road in California are Ev's.

Now i know how my grandfather must have felt back in the early 1960's. He used to watch the evening news, shake his head , and say : " What is this world coming to ? "

Originally Posted by ChildhoodDream

What is this world coming to?

The true question is "where is this world coming from?"

When you look at the flower ... the flower looks back.

Originally Posted by alloy2

If i did not have a good supply of waste cooking oil, propane or natural gas tapped into my home supply would be my choice for standby generator.

I'm not yet entirely sold on solar, EV's or the hybrids.

There is another side to the EV discussion worth considering. I was getting some job training on safe handling and storage of lithium ion batteries a few days ago. This video was highlighted as part of the presentation.



This is what sometimes happens out there in the world when things go wrong with a battery system for an EV.

There's a bunt EV been pushed onto municipal property been there four years now none of the scrap yards wants it in their yards. So there it sits leaking its toxic waste into a nearby lake.

I've posted pictures on the burnt out car on our local facebook site, no one knows what to do with it si there it remains.

Yeah ... there's a lot they're gonna have to figure out when all these EV's reach end of life and are sent off to the scrapyard. There's probably gonna be some money to be made from recycling the batteries. Other things too. The burning bus featured in the video above was originally made with over 800 lbs of copper in it's construction.

I suppose the fire danger of an EV isn't all that much different from a gas or propane powered vehicle when they go up.

Like you were saying before ... diesel is a much safer fuel source.

Got the day off so i was just messin' around on youtube this morning.

Lol ... you can actually buy an electric mini pickup for the farm or ranch from the manufacturer in China these days. The base model is only two thousand dollars. The real cost is closer to 8 grand after you add shipping and import fees but even so ... the price isn't all that bad.

Call me a fool but i would actually consider it. I drive less than 3000 miles a year and most of that is just the 4 mile commute back and forth to work with an occasional detour to the grocery store.

Another lithium battery fire in progress. This time at a French recycling facility housing 900 tons of them.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...es-2024-02-18/

Originally Posted by hills

Another lithium battery fire in progress. This time at a French recycling facility housing 900 tons of them.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...es-2024-02-18/

Key word: Immediate.

considering the environment of the factory and the behaviour of toxic fumes, these should not pose an immediate health risk to residents.

Originally Posted by alloy2

Key word: Immediate.

considering the environment of the factory and the behaviour of toxic fumes, these should not pose an immediate health risk to residents.

I suppose it's not like a chlorine gas or nuclear radiation leak that could kill people in a ten mile radius of the place. All the same .... there's probably some politics involved. It's not like the powers that be wouldn't try to downplay the risks involved with lithium ion batteries when they're trying to get the whole world shifted over to electric vehicles. They've already got trillions of dollars invested in this new thing.