Technical Alternative Starting Arrangements

12 ga Shotgun starter on an older Field Marshall Tractor.

 

I once owned a 1912 Fairbanks-Morse 25 horsepower stationary engine that had a starting arrangement consisting of a priming pump to pump fuel into the cylinder after you rotated the flywheels to get the engine to TDC.After this you briskly pushed a lever that operated a gadget that you "loaded" with a strike anywhere match head.This supposedly ignited the mixture in the cylinder and once the flywheels rotated once (they weighed about 1000 lbs) the magneto took over and the engine ran. I got this thing to actually work occasionally. I have no idea if it was OEM. It was MUCH simpler to use 2 men on the flywheels and one man who held the atmospheric intake valve slightly open with his hand-the two men got the flywheels rotating and the guy holding the intake valve let it go.Usually started right up.It was VERY important for the flywheel men to let go of the flywheels at the right time.

 

Pony motor start on an 820 John Deere. Still an electrical starter on the pony, but once the Diesel is running, there isn't much use for the transferring of electrons...

 

Fill a storage tank with compressed air using an engine powered compressor.

Then when the engine needs to start, open a valve and let this do the work:

 

My dads old diesel CAT had a gas pony motor you started with a rope pull. No electrical system at all!

 

I liked the pony motors on the 8T graders we had. You could start them when it was -20F. The pony motors were water cooled so they would warm the diesel engine coolant up. A little starting fluid got the pony started. Let that run for 20 minutes to warm the engine coolant. Pull the compression release and the belt tightener to turn the diesel engine over until it picks up some speed, release the compression release and it would start right up. When we got a newer one with an electric starter, it had to have the engine heater plugged in or be inside the shop to start.

 

My late uncle always told me about the time he got his 1940 Hudson stuck in a ditch somewhere. He walked to a nearby farm and asked if the somebody could pull him out. The lady said her husband was away but he could use the tractor if he could get it started. It was some really old tractor with one or two cylinders and huge flywheels. He said he just about killed himself trying to get it running, although he eventually did and pulled his car out. When the farmer got home and talked to him he found that there was a compression release he didn't know about No wonder it was hard to start.

 

i had to get a friends of mine's, john deere b started. i tinkered with it for a while, usual stuff, and got it running. i revved the motor up a little and the flywheel [also hand crank] came flying off. it bounced like a basketball as it was spinning and took off across his barn. it left burnt "skid" marks on the barn floor and a dent in a couple barn beams. it eventually ricochet off enough stuff to stop it.

 

Agreed! Now if we could just separate them from the Facebook stuff.

I'm very familiar with these starters. Bet I could start my V8-60 with one. Hmm...

 

That's borderline viable, if you've got an easy-starting engine. Even regulated down to 30psi that starter consumes 110 SCFM, which means that it'll use up the useful pressure in a typical 5-gallon air-suspension air tank at 125psi in about 12 seconds. There's a lot to be said for running 200psi in the tank, in which case you've got 21 seconds. If the engine won't start in that you'll have to make other arrangements.

Another way would be to use a much smaller air motor like this one to start a pony engine:

A 25-30cc lawn trimmer engine should do the job. I like how that would impose a routine on starting: pony ignition, wiggle pony throttle to prime via the accelerator pump, half-second air start, throttle back, let things warm up a bit, pinion-engage lever, main ignition, rev pony engine to engage centrifugal clutch, finesse gas pedal, get stable idle, kill pony engine.

The other way would be to provide some way to replenish air pressure with the engine off. Apparently Australian truckers use their rigs' tyres as air-pressure reservoirs, but they've got some 40 of them. Otherwise – if you have time – bicycle pump?

 

how about a "final approach" air braking system that would fill a tank, as the brakes were applied as you prepared to park? or for that matter wind a spring in the torque converter? no loss of energy.

 

I have a pull and release starter knob on the dash. HRP

 

You could use a tank of nitrogen @ 2000 PSI. I got wise to this from a friend who races stock cars. Years ago he replaced the air compressor on his tow rig with a nitrogen cylinder. Quiet, always available, he said one cylinder will last all season, and cost at that time $35.

If you go back to accounts of Bonneville speed records they were using nitrogen this way in the thirties. I believe this is where the myth started of nitrogen being better for tires or not expanding like regular air (not true - see Boyle's Law).

In any case a nitrogen cylinder would start your car many times and could be replaced in a few minutes at your local service station. That is, if we all decide we don't want electric start on our cars.

 

Joseph Lucas was responsible for more than refrigerators which inculcated a taste for warm beer. The Lucas cable push-pull wiper motor on my Morris Minor is a paragon of simple good sense, which I should heartily recommend anywhere except on this thread where we're trying to do away with electrical devices. Lucas also produced a clever mechanical starter which employed a stack of Belleville washers which could be compressed using a hand crank. Two modern British firms, Kineteco and Startwell, currently manufacture starters of this type. They are used on the like of lifeboats due to their absolute foolproof nature:


Winding up a starter motor with a winding handle underhood doesn't quite fit my brief, but we might again resort to an air motor, especially as that can wind the spring starter up while the engine is running.

This reminds me of my student days. In the early '80s there were sweet little things about the University of Pretoria reading BA Sociology and Husband-seeking, who would dress almost exclusively in combinations of yellow and purple. I cannot trace that craze to any contemporary macro-history: I suspect that it is something which someone heard wrong and which stuck in the way many things did in those days, when questioning one's data could be physically dangerous. Likewise these sweet little things would slather the make-up on like two-bit ******s because it was believed that that would impart a decorously feminine appearance without any hint of feminist heterodoxy. And their transport of choice or, more often, necessity was the Honda NC50 Express their dads bought them - as a rule in yellow because getting it in purple would mean having it painted specially:


The cause of this reminiscence is the fact that what looks like a kick-starter in the above pic is in fact part of a sort of clockwork mechanism similar in principle to the aforementioned Lucas-CAV spring starter, only at a prissier scale. One would push down on the pedal seven or eight times to wind up the starter. It was somehow fitting that these bakvissies should ride wind-up scooters.

But that's proof of concept right there, and the possibilities, so it is said, are endless.

 

Five gallons of nitrogen at 2000psi will let you roll an air starter for a total of about 4 minutes before the pressure is too low to use. If the engine starts in 3 seconds (and always does) that's 80 starts and then you're out of nitrogen.

It's possible to carry 5 gallons of air at 2000psi, though, and it's possible to get that out of an engine-driven compressor like a York or a Mopar RV2 which will pump at 200psi, by using an air booster:

These effectively trade flow for pressure, allowing a tank to be pressurized to up to 30 times the pump working pressure. In other words, the engine-driven compressor will be working for longer before it gets disconnected (by an air clutch instead of the usual electromagnetic one? – the parts exist) but there is a good chance of having 2000psi available a lot of the time.

 

My friend used a nitrogen cylinder on his stock car racing support truck and filled tires, ran air tools, cleaned parts etc every weekend. He told me one cylinder would last all season.

 

It seems totally feasible with modern electronics to start an engine without a starter motor. The engine management computer should know from a sensor where a piston is in relation to TDC then when the key is switched to "start" it would fire that fuel injector and the engine would rotate to the next "fire" position etc. until it is at idle speed.
My memory isn't what it used to be but I think the Bosch system in Europe was developed to eliminate weight and get mileage up and the big battery and starter motor would be around fifty pounds.

 

I work for a local fire department as a mechanic. When I first went there (31 years ago) there was one guy that worked on small engines. We had a brand of portable generator, Homelite, I think. If he could give the starter pulley a kick and it would run. He knew he had it tuned right.

 

A lot happening there. I believe some ZF transmissions incorporate a spring to give automatically turned off engines a quick spin to help them fire up again. Personally I can't stand those automatic stop-start systems. I've had enough engines in questionable condition that my instinct is not to let the thing die for anything once you've got it running. Besides, if saving fuel becomes that important it's merely symptomatic of overdependence on the dominant mobility system, not that most of us have much of a choice.

I've heard Mercedes-Benz is going to 48V electrics to power pretty much all engine ancillaries electrically – much the opposite to what I'm exploring here. Guilt by ***ociation, perhaps, but I want to get rid of the starter motor precisely because it has been known to keep company with such unsavoury things as engine management computers

 

I thought the only thing that Joe Lucas invented that actually worked was darkness.

 

This has got me thinking when was the last automatic transmission available with a rear pump?

 

Whenever we got a truck in with an air starter; I always made a special effort to park it in the corner of yard closest to the always complaining neighbor's house. Usually started them at 7 am, just to be sure.

 

This vid came up in my suggested vids a few days ago. Really interesting engine design.

 

I had a 76 Ford truck with a 460. It had a failing ignition module. Every once in a while I would turn the key on and hear the coil sparking constantly. More than one time just turning the key on started the engine.

On the sprint car it was, turn on the fuel valve, put it in gear, step on the brakes and signal the push truck to go. The stepping on the brakes was to protect the ring and pinion from a hard bump by a push truck. Once I saw oil pressure, I hit the mag switch and away we go.

Modern cars with start/stop systems play with the ignition and the fuel injectors to start the engine as soon as you step on the throttle from a stop light. The first car I rented with the start/stop system, I thought it had a transmission problem. If I really got on the throttle leaving a stop, there would be a slight bump as the engine restarted.

 

SS327; Lucas didn't invent darkness, that was just the result from the "quality" of his work & products.
Eons ago, when I drove city buses(the GM's which by then - late 80s' - had been rehabbed at least once), the old ~50's->early 60's GM buses w/a detroit(iirc) v6 & v8 used air starters. Man, those things shrieked as they 1st engaged the air to start spinning.
Ned, if anyone could make a mechanical version of the electric/electronic system jaracer mentioned - it's you! .
Marcus...

 

I believe Mercedes had it through the 70's. maybe someone can verify?

 

It looks like there was a very basic piston rear pump up to the 722.1, i.e. 1983.

 

I once helped a clever farmer friend get an old Drott bulldozer running. It hadn't been run in years. BIG diesel engine - actually gas-over-diesel - that was supposed to start on gasoline and switch to running on diesel. Trouble was the electric starter motor for the gas operation was shot. He removed the starter motor armature and extended the armature shaft out the back of the motor and attached a V-belt pulley. Then he removed the bar and chain from a chain saw and attached a similar pulley to the clutch. While I fiddled with the throttle controls he revved the chainsaw and engaged the belt on the armature Son of a gun it started the engine.

 

I had a couple of 700.01 apart from my 72 and had to repair the rear pump. wasn't sure how long they kept that design, thanks for the info