A guy I know who works at a cranberry bog as a maintenence man keeping the equipment and pumps running ,showed me a rather strange industrial engine recently..
Its a Hercules that came off an old water pump that was in a city water supply system as an emergency back up ,in case power was lost..
It was made in the early 50's he thinks,and it had only 50 something hours on it,according to the meter when they bought it at a surplus auction,it now has over 6000 hours though!..they run it 24/7 for several months a year ..
Whats strange about this engine is it burns diesel fuel,but it HAS spark plugs!--and a coil and a distributor....the compression ratio is around 15:1 as far as he can determine by what sparse info is available on these engines at the library,and he hasn;t seen much posted about them online either really..
He says it starts right up easily,even in colder weather,only a few times did he have to use ether to coax it along when it was below 10 degrees a few times...
After seeing it ,I thought to myself--too bad I couldn't put some 10MM spark plugs in my 6.2 ,if it had a distributor or a way to hook one up you'd never need glow plugs again!...not sure if it would work though,being a "true" diesel with 22:1 compression ,it might not make a hot enough spark to ignite cold diesel fuel...maybe it would allow for some exotic alternate fuels to be used though...
Its a Hercules that came off an old water pump that was in a city water supply system as an emergency back up ,in case power was lost..
It was made in the early 50's he thinks,and it had only 50 something hours on it,according to the meter when they bought it at a surplus auction,it now has over 6000 hours though!..they run it 24/7 for several months a year ..
Whats strange about this engine is it burns diesel fuel,but it HAS spark plugs!--and a coil and a distributor....the compression ratio is around 15:1 as far as he can determine by what sparse info is available on these engines at the library,and he hasn;t seen much posted about them online either really..
He says it starts right up easily,even in colder weather,only a few times did he have to use ether to coax it along when it was below 10 degrees a few times...
After seeing it ,I thought to myself--too bad I couldn't put some 10MM spark plugs in my 6.2 ,if it had a distributor or a way to hook one up you'd never need glow plugs again!...not sure if it would work though,being a "true" diesel with 22:1 compression ,it might not make a hot enough spark to ignite cold diesel fuel...maybe it would allow for some exotic alternate fuels to be used though...
..if it didn't weigh 2000 lbs it would be the ultimate "bug out" vehicle power plant!..
