You think you have trouble starting your car on a cold morning?

My friend had one like that, with the exhaust coming out through the wing to a silencer mounted up the side of the windscreen. It used to glow red hot going up long hills (slowly as you say)

Edited By duncan webster on 17/02/2021 19:07:30

I used to own a Commer Q4 and replaced the (very thirsty) petrol engine with a Perkins P6. I didn't have a KiGass pump so I had to make one, guessing at the working dimensions. It worked fine, though I made the mistake of not bothering to figure out a mechanism to lock down the plunger when not in use and relied on a separate screw down valve to shut off the line from pump to manifold. On occasion I would forget to do this, and the engine would suck the reservoir dry, resulting in bad words being said the next time I tried to start the thing from cold.

Although very, very slow, noisy and vibratory with the P6, it used half the fuel and had an important safety advantage: in it's petrol-powered days, I'd been appalled driving it one hot summer night at the height of the Portuguese forest fire season to see showers of sparks being ejected from the exhaust on downward gear changes, straight into the tinder-dry roadside vegetation...

I think you'd need a LOT of batteries to shift 400 tons of train

I’m just being mischievous Steve.

To add to my tomfoolery … with the engine already the right colour, each carriage could carry a ton of Tesla’s too!

Where there is no overhead supply, the batteries could be inductively charged from magnets between the rails, while regenerative braking would be a spin-off.

Not very efficient I'd guess, but who cares about efficiency anymore?

OK, I’m going.

Sam

I remember back in the 60s still living with my parents in Brum being woken up every morning by a builder trying to start his Ford Cortina estate, it just churned over and over for what seemed eternity. From that day on I have always contended that Ford were pioneers in long life batteries.

Bill D.

Also in the 60’s Bill, my first vehicle was a Morris minivan. By the late 60’s I got really posh and bought a neighbour’s Ford Anglia. Neither were garaged so winter starts in the north of England could be a bit exasperating.

However, I learned something you can’t do on modern cars.

Parking the vehicle for the night while the engine was still hot and running, the trick was to pull the choke at the same time as turning off the ignition.

It hardly ever failed to produce an instant start the following morning.

Sam

PS Cold starts have never caused me a problem where I now live.

Hi Sam, I also learnt the trick about pulling the choke out, always worked. Of course, on modern cars don't have that facility.

Regards Nick.

You can almost smell the particulates... <cough>

I fitted a manual choke to the VV carb on my cortina, later fitter a twin Weber off a transit

The other strategy was to rev up and cut the power. Not recommended for diesels.

I remember, must have been 83, travelling up the A1 from Lincolnshire to Northumberland and back, during a spell of bitterly cold weather and really heavy snow, there was only single track all the way as the snow ploughs had only cleared enough for single track each side of the dual carriageway, there were numerous diesel lorries abandoned at the side of the road unable to move because the fuel waxed. Many of them had fires lit under the fuel tanks hoping to get the fuel moving, fortunately we had a petrol engined van. Remember sleeping in a Services wooden hut in Northumberland and that night temperature dropped to -18 C, that was cold, it was no wonder diesel vehicles couldn’t move. Dave W

And then we complained when the bores were shot at 70,000.

Getting further away from the thread, with apologies to Neil, over a weekend around Xmas 1939-40, as a result of a very heavy snowfall, the public transport services in Bolton were brought to a complete standstill.

It was essential however, for WWII munitions to continue especially at De Havilland and the Loco Works near Horwich.

On the Monday morning, in their haste to clear the snow from the tramways between Horwich and Bolton, the Bolton office urged the Horwich crew to start snow clearance of the left hand track. The Bolton crew would meet them somewhere halfway. By Wednesday, both crews had made good progress.

Needless to say, they didn’t actually meet in the middle as planned. Only the left hand tracks had been cleared.

Sam

My parents neighbour was of the old school. Always used a yellow oil heater under the sump from about October till late spring. Same procedure every year.
His latest car was a Volvo with the daf ( t ) system of variable speed belt and pulleys.
A passing fire engine on its way back to Cambridge saw the garage on fire, stopped and put it out . Meanwhile he woke, smelt the smoke, dialled 999 and was a bit surprised by the knock on the door.
pete

I wonder if the simplicity Frances cites, of Soviet engineering, was part of its efficacy in extreme conditions - some regions of Siberia have the greatest annual temperature anywhere in the world, at typically -40 to +40ºC.

Operating steam locomotives in such conditions must have been a challenge to say the least, and their cabs were usually wood-lined to protect the crews. They also had outer hand-rails along the running-plates, ordered by law by the pre-Revolutionary Tsar (Nicholas II?) after a railwayman slipped on the iced steelwork and fell to his death.

Once, my Internet home-page gave a link to a history of a terrible railway project, slave-built under Stalin's rule to link two Siberian coast ports about 700 miles apart. President Kruschev's government quietly abandoned the project, not far from completion. The photographs included a couple of a derelict steam locomotive, stripped of many parts. That is in the High Arctic.

'

Chokes?

My sister took on our Dad's pride and joy, a Commer motor-caravan with 2.2l petrol-engine. Once day, after she had spent hundreds of ££ restoring it after Dad's long illness had confined it to the garage for many years, she lent it to friends for a day out, in good weather.

They reported it broke down and had to be recovered.

They had either forgotten or ignored her very careful instructions on using the one control totally new and incomprehensible to them - the choke.

A friend's son in law helped by cutting the church grass. Sadly he did not realise that once running, the choke should be released, and the control returned to the Max speed setting.. From then on the little Honda would go from Max to below Min on the dipstick in 2 hours running.

The latest replacement no longer has a speed control. Basically just a Stop /Go control, giving constant speed so he obviously was not alone in making that error.

The Ford 105E and its larger variants was sensitive to the Choke/Throttle interconnection. Correctly set, cold starts were no problem. Full choke and crank, then release to half way once the engine was running. Upset it and you were in trouble!

The Renault 6TL was the same. Unless the choke was partially released after run up, it would hunt, flood and then it was get a spare battery or tow start to clear the flooding!

Howard

That was very unlucky, the belts were mounted at the rear axle. Whole underside must have got stinking hot

I had same problem went out house at 5 a.m when on 6-2 so didn't like waking neighbours so I fitted a 6 volt HT coil and a resistor but when starting the coil was fed with 12 volts this cured the cold start problem.

H

‘‘Twas not the belts that was the problem but a fuel leak and an oil leak from rocker box cover.

pete

In the days of Morris traveller series 2 ( split screen ) the last cell on the battery had been bridged by short piece of 3/16 brazing rod thus 12 volt was really 10 volt. I push started it down the hill in the morning and got the kids to push start me in the afternoon so I could get home. 3 months before I could afford new battery.
You never had it so good

pete