Cape Vintage Engine & Machinery
Society Newsletter
Paraffinalia No 23
October 2003
Hello All!
Technical Tips: When dealing with the fuel injection pumps, I made mention of a light load advance device, and realise that timing is a subject well worth dealing with.
Why do we have spark ignition or fuel injection timed before TDC?
The answer is simply that the mixture of fuel and air takes time to burn.
Note, I say burn, it doesn't and mustn't explode as the old people
used to say! The time taken for the mixture to burn, depending on such variables
as pressure and temperature, is constant, so that the faster the engine
is running, the earlier in crank degrees the fuel must start to
burn. It is essential that all burning is complete while the piston is still
effectively at TDC, and that only hot gases push the piston down. Otherwise
flames will still be present, licking away at the oil on the cylinder
walls, while the piston is on the way down. To compound this problem, the
further the piston goes down the bore, the lower the pressure becomes. The
lower the pressure, the slower the remaining mixture burns.... so that in
an extreme case, flames can be present when the exhaust valve opens! The result is you have less power from the engine,
burned oil on the bores, burned exhaust valves, and an overheated engine!
The cooling jacket of the cylinder isn't made to absorb the heat of flames.
Only hot, burnt gases.
Just to make it more complicated, a weak mixture
burns more slowly than a correct mixture, so an engine set too lean will
also display these tendencies. This is why when and economy device is built
into a carburettor, it must operate only when the automatic advance systems
are operating to their fullest extent.
Philip Gray-Taylor wrote
in to say that he has solved a problem he asked about in Paraffinalia 19,
concerning the governor of his little Sachs Stamo-powered generator: I
eventually got it right after stripping, deburring and assembling the
governor, and after discovering that the number of balls in the governor
coincided with a speed of 3600rpm. Closer inspection of the name plate revealed
that the frequency of the generator wasn't 50 as I first thought but 60!
No wonder I couldn't get it to govern down to 3000. Thanks to Wouter
van Gulik, for offering to send a copy of the manual, but I thought
I'd just get stuck in and fix it.
Well, that wasn't much under Technical Tips, so how
about a restoration story instead? John
Menasce wrote in:
With all the intere
st in Turner engines recently here's my story: Scratching around for lost
and forgotten engine treasures when on holiday last Christmas in the Eastern
Cape, I was shown a very forlorn looking heap of iron with a somewhat flattened
radiator attached to it. The engine had come out of a pump house some 30+
years earlier and been dumped in an old barn where a roof timber came down
in storm and flattened the radiator. The engine was largely complete and
had the name Turner Diesel on the crankcase. I had never heard of Turner
Diesel but knew of Turner Engineering and their association with Land Rover.
My son David and I stripped the engine over the holiday. The biggest challenge being to remove the corroded and siezed piston, which took us two days, two cans of Q20 and a 4 lb hammer to dislodge it. It finally came free, largely unscathed. I brought the dismantled and partially cleaned engine home in my trailer and then began a search to find out what I really had. Andy Selfe sent me a copy of a Turner service manual and I was able to identify the engine as a 1V95 Turner, rated at 6 BHP at 1200 rev/min according to the note on the rocker cover. The serial number identified it as 1948 vintage. Then came the search for spares, as the piston was very badly corroded. Eventually, again through Andy, I made contact with Richard Lines in the UK and he put me onto Glynn Beach who was able to send me a spare parts list, as well as pricing on spares still available in England. A search through Neil Busch's premises in Johannesburg produced a very similar piston from a 5/1 or 6/1 Lister [3.75 ins dia] and I was then able to get the original aluminium piston welded up and remachined to its original specs based on the Lister piston. The combus
tion chamber is merely a V groove in the piston crown and I hand fettled
the groove with ease. The CAV pump and injector are identical to the Lister
6/1 and I set the cracking pressure accordingly. A Lister type A silencer
fitted the exhaust flange too. The missing fuel tank was replaced with a
Villiers tank from Neil that looked reasonably similar to the pictures of
the original Turner tanks. The tank brackets were missing completely so
I suspect that this engine originally had a separate wall mounted fuel tank
which was long since gone.
Andy kindly sent me a new head gasket and a spare compression ring. Engine bearings were in good condition but the conrod was bent from some past calamity [maybe the siezed piston] and the small end needed refurbishing as well as the engine head and the valves which I had done by Metric Engineering in Germiston. Finally after 6 months I was able to start assembly and found that the only way to assemble the conrod and piston was to fit the conrod to the crank, then fit the piston and rings to the conrod, and then lower the barrel onto the piston!! The service manual was woefully inadequate, so I then based all the running clearances and the bump settings on the 6/1 Lister as the pre combustion chamber and piston sizes were very similar [looks like a Ricardo design combustion system]. The information on the tappet cover provided the tune-up data including the spill timing an
d valve clearances.
Stef Madin's three articles then appeared in the Stationary Engine Magazine and provided some more information on the build of the engine and the peripherals like the radiator mountings. I was sent a picture by Richard of a Turner Genset he owned and this provided some more pieces to the puzzle and the only things I really had to invent were the fuel linkages. The oil pump was cleaned out and reassembled [very complicated reciprocating pump driven off the second camshaft].
Finally I was able to start the bare engine with the block filled with water and the outlets plugged. The radiator meanwhile was being expertly restored by Greens Radiators in Johannesburg and tinplated again as it had been originally. Finally I had the whole engine and radiator assembled and was ready for a decent test run. It runs beautifully at 800 r/min with little vibration or noise. It now stands on a trolley too. With its polished brass parts and copper piping it looks really good and I am hoping to show it at either RSME in Johannesburg in September or the Nottingham Rd Show in October.
st in Turner engines recently here's my story: Scratching around for lost
and forgotten engine treasures when on holiday last Christmas in the Eastern
Cape, I was shown a very forlorn looking heap of iron with a somewhat flattened
radiator attached to it. The engine had come out of a pump house some 30+
years earlier and been dumped in an old barn where a roof timber came down
in storm and flattened the radiator. The engine was largely complete and
had the name Turner Diesel on the crankcase. I had never heard of Turner
Diesel but knew of Turner Engineering and their association with Land Rover.My son David and I stripped the engine over the holiday. The biggest challenge being to remove the corroded and siezed piston, which took us two days, two cans of Q20 and a 4 lb hammer to dislodge it. It finally came free, largely unscathed. I brought the dismantled and partially cleaned engine home in my trailer and then began a search to find out what I really had. Andy Selfe sent me a copy of a Turner service manual and I was able to identify the engine as a 1V95 Turner, rated at 6 BHP at 1200 rev/min according to the note on the rocker cover. The serial number identified it as 1948 vintage. Then came the search for spares, as the piston was very badly corroded. Eventually, again through Andy, I made contact with Richard Lines in the UK and he put me onto Glynn Beach who was able to send me a spare parts list, as well as pricing on spares still available in England. A search through Neil Busch's premises in Johannesburg produced a very similar piston from a 5/1 or 6/1 Lister [3.75 ins dia] and I was then able to get the original aluminium piston welded up and remachined to its original specs based on the Lister piston. The combus
tion chamber is merely a V groove in the piston crown and I hand fettled
the groove with ease. The CAV pump and injector are identical to the Lister
6/1 and I set the cracking pressure accordingly. A Lister type A silencer
fitted the exhaust flange too. The missing fuel tank was replaced with a
Villiers tank from Neil that looked reasonably similar to the pictures of
the original Turner tanks. The tank brackets were missing completely so
I suspect that this engine originally had a separate wall mounted fuel tank
which was long since gone.Andy kindly sent me a new head gasket and a spare compression ring. Engine bearings were in good condition but the conrod was bent from some past calamity [maybe the siezed piston] and the small end needed refurbishing as well as the engine head and the valves which I had done by Metric Engineering in Germiston. Finally after 6 months I was able to start assembly and found that the only way to assemble the conrod and piston was to fit the conrod to the crank, then fit the piston and rings to the conrod, and then lower the barrel onto the piston!! The service manual was woefully inadequate, so I then based all the running clearances and the bump settings on the 6/1 Lister as the pre combustion chamber and piston sizes were very similar [looks like a Ricardo design combustion system]. The information on the tappet cover provided the tune-up data including the spill timing an
d valve clearances.Stef Madin's three articles then appeared in the Stationary Engine Magazine and provided some more information on the build of the engine and the peripherals like the radiator mountings. I was sent a picture by Richard of a Turner Genset he owned and this provided some more pieces to the puzzle and the only things I really had to invent were the fuel linkages. The oil pump was cleaned out and reassembled [very complicated reciprocating pump driven off the second camshaft].
Finally I was able to start the bare engine with the block filled with water and the outlets plugged. The radiator meanwhile was being expertly restored by Greens Radiators in Johannesburg and tinplated again as it had been originally. Finally I had the whole engine and radiator assembled and was ready for a decent test run. It runs beautifully at 800 r/min with little vibration or noise. It now stands on a trolley too. With its polished brass parts and copper piping it looks really good and I am hoping to show it at either RSME in Johannesburg in September or the Nottingham Rd Show in October.
Louis Boshoff sent in this report on the Koos Kriel Engine Day in Potchefstroom:
Yesterday we visited Oom Koos Kriel in Potchefstoom. Like always we
were made welcome by oom Koos and his wife who treated us with something
to eat and drink during the day . Also the fires to for the braai was there. Best
of all of course the "engine manne" and all the talk about engines and what
goes with it . I counted 45 engines early in the morning but some more arrived
later. Deon Bouwer's Continental Radial (See Right) welcomed us from far away with a
healthy sounding sound which only a radial can generate. A lot of Wolseleys
and derivatives of it was on the show. It included Vetsak , Trojan
and Senator. The V4 "donkey" engine out of a John-Deere diesel impressed
me. A large spark plug collection was on exhibition. It is amazing to see
how many variations there are, even from the same manufacturer. Of course
we miss Johan Van Vuuren . Hope he will join us soon
, the shows is not the same without him. Deon
adds these details about his engine: It is a 9 cylinder radial Wright Whirlwind, built
under licence by Continental in June 1944 . The engine's capacity is 965
cubic inches (15.8 L). At idle she consumes 20L/hr. At full power
[450hp] this goes up to 210 litres! It started for the first time ever in
June 2003, 59 years to the day after being built. It had been outside so long that its 
packing case had rotted away. My luck was that the engine had
been inhibited, and flushed with preserving oil before it went into
storage . I had a look in the bores with a boroscope , and after 60 years
they still shone like mirrors. They are tapered, nitrided [hardened] steel
liners .
A few Saturdays ago, Kosie van der Merwe and
I, acting on a tip off, made one of those early (4am!) starts, and were
in Beaufort West by 8am, well on the way to a farm on the Britstown side
of Victoria West, in the Northern Cape Province. We were to visit Sakkie
van der Merwe (no relation) who has an interesting engine-driven
mill on his combined Merino Stud and hunting farm. He was busy with a hunting
party as we arrived, but abandoned them to show us the mill set up. On first
inspection, the engine looked like a Petter Atomic, but something was wrong.
Closer examination revealed that it was an Ellwe, single cylinder direct
injection 2-stroke diesel, compressed-air-start engine, 
made in Sweden! (See Right) It has suffered
what we all hope is minor damage, as a result of a broken actuating rod
on the plunger-type water circulation pump, and has a swarm of bees in the
exhaust and perhaps in the cylinder, but is otherwise as last used, ready
to belt up to the mill and a later addition, a seed dresser. (See Right) The mill has only the name Tigris cast
into it, and the seed dresser: Stahl-Neusaat, F Neuhaus GmbH., Eberswalde.
Does anybody have any information on these? Sakkie is all fired up to get
it operational again, as an added attraction to his tourist-oriented
farm. The mill is in very good order, and the plan is to mill small quantities
of flour and present them in cloth bags.
made in Sweden! (See Right) It has suffered
what we all hope is minor damage, as a result of a broken actuating rod
on the plunger-type water circulation pump, and has a swarm of bees in the
exhaust and perhaps in the cylinder, but is otherwise as last used, ready
to belt up to the mill and a later addition, a seed dresser. (See Right) The mill has only the name Tigris cast
into it, and the seed dresser: Stahl-Neusaat, F Neuhaus GmbH., Eberswalde.
Does anybody have any information on these? Sakkie is all fired up to get
it operational again, as an added attraction to his tourist-oriented
farm. The mill is in very good order, and the plan is to mill small quantities
of flour and present them in cloth bags.Once home, (at 10pm that night, with more than 1300 km under my
belt!) I couldn't wait to contact Nils-Erik Sjöstrand,
our Swedish member, who replied as follows:
Concerning the Ellwe, it is
a special Diesel engine. There are only a few left. I probably have seen
some 4 engines. Yesterday I found one together with some friends in an old
flour mill...
(!) Rare as hens' teeth, and on the
same day he discovers another, doing the same job as Sakkie's! Last time
we heard of this make, it was from Terence Taylour in Ireland,
who came across a larger twin cylinder which had been removed from
a 1920s Thames barge.
The Western Cape Tractor & Engine Club Annual Show was held this year again at the Kleinplasie Museum grounds
in Worcester. Althouth the weather was not as good as last year, at least
the short showers we experienced put the fire out that was raging in the
mountains above the town! This year, the theme was that each of the groups
would stage a show of its own, and compete for a prize. This meant
that our members' engines were dotted around the grounds, as part of the
exhibits from their areas. It would be impossible to mention everybody,
but stands of exceptional interest included Nico Lubbe's
crowd from the Olifants River, near Clanwilliam with a complete
forge set up, with hourly demonstrations. (See right)
Nico has done a blacksmithing course, and was able to show us the techniques,
including his signals to his No2. They also had a small Crossley hot bulb
running, a rare engine here.Jacques Hough had
spent many hours bringing back to operation a Keystone borehole rig. (See Right) I use that expression advisedly,
because this machine is now in the condition in 
which it would have operated, complete with pieces of tyre stuffed in, instead
of bearings, as would have been the case in its working days! Jacques had
used parts of the old derelict Star drilling rig which has been lying outside
Kleinplasie for many years to do this, and this also demonstrated how operators
would mix and match to keep a rig operational. It was belted up to a disreputable
looking John Deere 40 Crawler, as a further authentic touch!
which it would have operated, complete with pieces of tyre stuffed in, instead
of bearings, as would have been the case in its working days! Jacques had
used parts of the old derelict Star drilling rig which has been lying outside
Kleinplasie for many years to do this, and this also demonstrated how operators
would mix and match to keep a rig operational. It was belted up to a disreputable
looking John Deere 40 Crawler, as a further authentic touch!The Worcester group had Fanie
Fouchè's Petter Fielding EH Mk 1A (which has the next
serial number to mine!) thumping away, and André Nel
and his crowd were
demonstrating the fitting of a tapered
sleeve to restore a loose flywheel on a Lister 6/1.
Johan Stemmet who
was the show's commentator, also organised the Robertson stand which
won the prize. They had taken on the Ford 100 year theme, and at one stage, had
Ford products parked out to produce a big 100 when viewed from above.
Some time ago, a request came in about a Ford Stationary Engine. A Ford
Industrial Engine? No, a Stationary Engine! A twin cylinder,
attached to a generator, and air cooled, to boot. Recently Charles
Torrance from Montagu brought the set home, and sure enough 'Ford.
Port Elizabeth' plates are attached to both generator (a Hoffberg,
like the Listers use) and the engine, which turns out to be a Kirloskar. Ryan
Gray-Taylor traced that name to India, and their website states
that they make Lister and Petter copies, whether under licence or not, we
are not sure. This engine bears a strong resemblance to a Petter AVA2, but
instead of a flywheel fan, it has a Deutz / SAME / MWM -type air blower
and shroud. The tappet covers and injector layout, as well as the crankcase
doors which look very familiar. Charles has written to Kirloskar for more
information, but if any reader has more information, please contact us. 
News from Peter Ogborne, Albany, West Australia: I
have caught the steam boat bug, badly! Having seen two boats that have been
built down here I am hooked .The first "Lugworm'' has a home-built duplex
steam engine operating from a flash boiler. Buzz Blake
built this engine and boiler, the hull is reconditioned clinker, re-caulked
with one of these Silastic compounds, so that it can be trailered and played
with at home. The other boat ''Whisper'' has a 100-year-old twin horizontal
steam engine that originally came from a Locomobile car, spent some years
as a power plant for a fishing boat then sort of retired to tow a fruit
barge up and down the Kalgan River. 
USA News: Dusty Erickson reports from a very hot and dry Arizona:
The
restoration of
piece was to do with Peter Ogborne's Mystery Engine, and
Patrick Knight, through Roland Craven,
thought it might be a Kynoch. I wrote: On the subject of Kynoch, I found this reference to the name
in the website of the Historical Firearms Society of South Africa, which
Johannesburg member Chris Baragwanath had referred me to:
'The society claimed another feather for its cap when funds were raised
from members and a number of sponsors to restore the grave of George
Kynoch in Johannesburg which was in a state of disrepair.'
So I passed the request on to Chris, who wrote: This e-mail is an amazing coincidence, in
that it was just last Sunday that I went down to the Braamfontein Cemetery
(Johannesburg) to find Kynoch's Grave (See right)
and assess the condition, as it is possibly due for restoration! I am also currently looking for a willing
Gardening Service to go in once a month and keep the surround clean.
The headstone reads: In memory of George
Kynoch, Member of Parliament for Aston Manor, England from 1886 to 1891 and
Founder of the Lion Ammunition Works, Witton, Birmingham, who died February
28th 1891. This memorial was erected by his
former workspeople and constituents, March 1894. Dusty now has a choice of 10 1-week-old photographs to choose
from, so watch for his article in Stationary Engine Magazine! Don't
subscribe? Ag, shame!
UK News: Patrick Knight kindly sent in this report: The Great Dorset Steam Fair 2003.
For many UK enthusiasts of vintage machinery, be they interested in Steam
Traction Engines, Tractors or Stationary Engines the Great Dorset Steam
Fair is the highlight of their rallying calendar. Indeed, for some the importance
of the GDSF is such that all other things in life are juggled/put on hold
to ensure that they can attend the show. This year I went as a paying customer,
with so much to see and only two days to see it, that my first port of call
was the stationary engine section. I must say that I was somewhat disappointed
with what I saw. The overall quality and presentation of the engines
was down on previous years. I am happy to see engines in various degrees
of restoration, from still in their working clothes through to fully restored,
it is all down to owner's preference. But what I was 
disappointed with was presentation. An engine surrounded by tools, oily rags
and empty beer cans hardly does anything to promote the hobby, does
it? On the other hand there were a few exceptions to the rule, where exhibitors
had gone to great lengths to ensure the public were entertained and
educated while viewing their engines. They kept their patch clean and tidy
and provided some form of information board and/or properly filled-in engine
log sheets. It does not sound much, but which would you prefer? Next time
you are at a show, go and stand the other side of the ropes for a few minutes
and look at your engine the way the paying public see it. Is there
be something you can do to improve your display? 
should the need arise. For added public interest many of the engines were
doing a job of work appropriate to their horsepower. 
Muscat, one of the main organiser of the Australian Plough and be Counted 2, Australia’s attempt
at the record which is due to take place over the long Easter Weekend 2004.
tue from 1949 until the-mid 1970’s and has run his own business since that
time. He dealt with Cooper’s quite a bit in the 1950’s and was involved
with obtaining the Moffat Virtue-badged Cooper types RV & PT. This may
be of interest to anyone needing spares for any of the above engines, he
can be contacted at Jarky Engine Spares Agency, 4 Willfox Street, Bankstown.
NSW. 2200. Ph 02 9709 4923. 