Today's excitement has been...

[vernon]

Resurrecting my Lister D stationary engine. It's been standing idle in the garage buried under a pile of junk that is now either in the bin or at the recycling centre.

My first attempts at starting it bore no fruit and investigations show no spark at the spark plug. A quick clean of the points in the magneto and it started on the first attempt.

After tweak of the air mixture control it settled to a steady beat.

It could well turn out to be a winter restoration project. The paint is the wrong colour and the trolley needs the timber replacing.

I will be celebrating later with a bottle of 1983 blackberry wine that I discovered lurking in the back of a store cupboard in the garage. A test tasting was very promising.

 

[TheDoctor]

Damn you!! I'd been looking at turbo-trainers on Ebay, and I'm now wondering if I've got enough stuff in my garage to knock together a bike-powered Scalextric.
I just need a dynamo, a bridge rectifier (or a diode would do, at a pinch) and enough metalwork to hold the back wheel up in the air a bit. And some Scalextric, obviously...

 

[biggs682]

Damn you!! I'd been looking at turbo-trainers on Ebay, and I'm now wondering if I've got enough stuff in my garage to knock together a bike-powered Scalextric.
I just need a dynamo, a bridge rectifier (or a diode would do, at a pinch) and enough metalwork to hold the back wheel up in the air a bit. And some Scalextric, obviously...

had a go on one of these a while back it was great fun apart from getting beat by my 12 yr old daughter

 

[TheDoctor]

That's the way with kids. I dread the day I get out-skiied by my mates' daughter.
She's five, and she can keep up fairly well already. Can't hold her beer though.

 

[Globalti]

Wow! That flywheel! Thank God modern automotive turbo diesels don't have a flywheel as heavy as that, it would take ages to get away from the lights!

When I was kid I used to help out on a farm, the farmer had a huge diesel tractor with a massive flywheel and a big fat exhaust; it absolutely terrified me.

 

[Tcr4x4]

Was at the listers factory the other day, well what's left of it.
Most of it is now a housing estate and industrial estate, shame really.

 

[vernon]

Damn you!! I'd been looking at turbo-trainers on Ebay, and I'm now wondering if I've got enough stuff in my garage to knock together a bike-powered Scalextric.
I just need a dynamo, a bridge rectifier (or a diode would do, at a pinch) and enough metalwork to hold the back wheel up in the air a bit. And some Scalextric, obviously...

I don't have to bother with all of that faff.

I've also got a BSA powered generator waiting for its turn to be resurrected.

Perhaps when I get the Scalextric down from the loft.....

 

[Puddles]

Resurrecting my Lister D stationary engine. It's been standing idle in the garage buried under a pile of junk that is now either in the bin or at the recycling centre.

My first attempts at starting it bore no fruit and investigations show no spark at the spark plug. A quick clean of the points in the magneto and it started on the first attempt.

After tweak of the air mixture control it settled to a steady beat.

It could well turn out to be a winter restoration project. The paint is the wrong colour and the trolley needs the timber replacing.

I will be celebrating later with a bottle of 1983 blackberry wine that I discovered lurking in the back of a store cupboard in the garage. A test tasting was very promising.

I have been listening to similar thunk thunk thunk all day in various forms, two old tractors had quite a movement on them when they were idling, one shimmied side to side the other shimmied up and down... there were also stationary engines at the Brickworks too but I do not know what they were, they thunked nicely though