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Clockwork starter motor

Asquith

Diamond
Joined
Mar 3, 2005
Location
Somerset, UK
I know about clockwork toys, wind-up radios, even clockwork clocks.

Today I watched someone proceed to hand crank a smallish Lister twin cylinder diesel without grimacing. I was so impressed, I had a go myself.

Wz02.jpg


Boring photo, but note the hexagonal shaft for a hand crank (for some reason it appears to be glowing like a red hot rivet – it wasn’t!). You wind the handle against a gently clicking ratchet until the spring is quite tight, push the adjacent lever down, and bang, the engine turns over and starts.

Must have been around for decades, but I’ve never seen one before. Marvellous.

Made by Simms.
 
40 years ago I had a starter that operated the same way on a Clinton 2 stroke engine on a go cart - the starter was made for a vertical shaft lawn mower engine.
 
Didn't some aircraft engines during ww2 have a springwound inertia starter?
I had one of those mowers too. Didn't make it any easier to start.

Bob
"if it ain't broke, fix it until it is!"
 
The WWII radial aircraft inertial starters were not spring operted. They used a very high gear ratio and a big heavy flywheel. You cranked on the overdriven input shaft to get the flywheel up to speed. A clutch then engaged this flywheel to start the engine... and you better catch it on the first hit or the ground crew was going to be PO'ed.

Smaller aircraft had a similar spring-driven setup that was wound up with what looked like a parking brake lever. You ratcheted the lever a fwe strokes and then turned the spring loose. Better than a hand start.
 
Prior to the invention of the electric starter for automobiles there were several varities of spring wound starters that worked in abut the same way - as long as the engine was in reasonable tune they worked well. They were especially useful on cars that had magneto ignition and acetelene lights but the advent of automobile electrical systems put an end to them.
Joe Puleo
 
Asquith,

I have never seen or heard of that one either, very neat!

I was "employed" once by a friend of a friend to provide cranking power on a four cylinder Kelvin diesel on a launch trip up the Thames. It was hard work, decompressed and all!

We had a Lister "Startomatic" when I was a kid, it provided all our power. They had a clever system for starting. You simply turned on a light switch or whatever in the house, and the 24? volt battery-supplied circuit energised the generator, which started spinning the diesel. A solenoid held it decompressed. The motor was run right up to full speed before being allowed to start, whereupon
it began generating 230 volts AC at the correct cycles. A great system!

As for the lawn mowers with wind up start (Lawson too?) they were a gimmick. I used to mow our neighbours lawn (and then I could watch their TV :D ), this system worked ok when the mower started well, otherwise it was a curse! You unfolded a sheetmetal lever, wound up the spring, re-folded the lever, hit the release button....mutter, mutter.

It went the way of those other gimmicks like B&S electric starter, the little plunger that allowed you to check the oil level without unscrewing the oil filler etc etc.

Of of the very best of the early motor cars was the French built Delaunay-Belleville. They built some big cars (11.8 litres) for the Russian Tsar and fitted them with air starting gear in 1909. "A Saurer compresed-air starter which could be used to inflate tyres, jack up the wheels, or blow a whistle".

The air start allowed the Tsar to make silent and quick getaways, lessening the chances of an assasins bullet....

Later in 1912, they fitted the Barbey compressed-air starter as an optional extra. Instead of sending air into the engine cylinders, there was a horizontally opposed four-cylinder motor and pump mounted on the nose of the crankshaft. It could also double as tyre pump or jack, and later, to assist the brakes in downhill work.

A brief life, as electric starters appeared by 1914.

Other unusual starters that intrigue me? The shotgun cartridge start on the Marshall tractors, the Coffman starter on the Napier Sabre (one of my teachers flew Typhoons, he said they could be a swine to start, and if you used all the start cartridges, you then had to remove all 48 sparkplugs....
Another old friend told me about using the inertia starters on the Bristol Pegasus motors we had in NZ pre WW2 on the Wildebeeste aircraft. Hard work, he said, curses all round if the engine didn't fire first time!

A very large Ruston single cylinder diesel engine near me uses an air bottle start - effortless! Then recharges the bottle using its own compression (without fuel).
 
The McDowell Air Safety starter was standard on Aeronca Chief light aircraft. It was the aforementioned emergency brake-appearing shaft mounted on the left side of the cockpit with a steel cable attached to the mechanism which was fitted to the front of the engine, just behind the propeller spinner.

A friend owned a Stampe biplane which was a Belgian almost-copy of a deHavilland Tiger Moth. The Renault inverted inline four cylinder engine was equipped with an air starter, recharged by an engine driven compressor. The sound was like an air compressor, immediately followed by a running engine! Forever leaking joints in the air system meant hand propping if the the engine was not started for a few days.

Asquith, the clockwork Lister starter gives new meaning to the engine "ticking over!"

Tom in Calgary
(it's springtime in the Rockies)
 
When I was a kid in the 70s, we had a lawn mower with I think a brigs and straton that had a wind up crank on the top. You opened the crank to wind it up, and then slammed it shut to trip the spring that would turn over the engine.
 
I have what I believe is a one off experimental 8 cyl opposed marine engine. It has a Bendix Eclipse aviation inertia starter mounted on top as the motor sits vertical. Late 20s early 30s vintage with gear driven overhead cam and leaf springs to operate the valves.I have spent several years researching this motor with no luck, maybe I need to post some pictures here and have better luck.
Rick
 
mehtods of starting engines has always interested me. At the Goodwood Speed festival a few years ago there was a Napier, I think, with a very large engine. I belive it came over from a Dutch museum for the festival. Anyway, it had magneto ignition, but to start the engine it was first barred over a few times, to prime the cylinders, using a large bar in some holes in the flywheel. The flywheel was then positioned at a starting mark. A trembler coil system was then activated and, hey presto, the engine fired and continued to run without any fuss.

On a slightly different aspect of starting engines it is a requirement that a ship's main engine, no matter how large, must be capable of being started by hand. This requirement is usually satisfied by having some sort of hand started diesel that will run a compressor to start the main auxilliaries which can then charge up the main compressed air receiver for main engine starting. Some ships have hydraulic starter motors on the auxilliary engines. These are activated by manually pumping up a hydraulic accumulator which powers the starter motor, which starts the auxially engine, which powers the main compressor and then you can start the main engine. If all that fails, in a corner of every ships engine room is a large manually operated double acting air pump which whould take two very fit matelots to operate. This can be used to charge the main air receiver to start the main engine. The air receiver, by the way, when fully charged, must be able to provide six starts for the main engine without additional assistance from the compressors.
 
I have used a few machines that were fitted with those starters. Sometimes with some machinery they have a normal starter, and a windup starter as a backup.

Always look for signs of dried blood on the engine; it is a good indication of the ratchets condition. :(

Some big engines fitted with those starters, can be a pig to start, taking several winding and release attempts. Conversely engines so equipped, can be the best maintained. No one wanting to spend an hour or so attempting to start the engine, fuel filters are invariably in good condition.

With a normal starter, as the starting performance degrades, one hardly notices the extra time spent turning the key, or pushing the starter button. With a manual starter motor, you notice the extra starting time.
 
Well, I was hoping this topic would draw some interesting responses, and it’s great to learn all this fascinating stuff. Hate to single any comment out, but I was particularly struck by Doug's observation that if you have to hand start something regularly, it's more likely to be kept well-maintained. I'll mention it to Mrs Asquith next time I see her struggling to get the lawn mower going. ;)

Another good thing is that it’s lured TechnicalTom out of hibernation. ‘Ticking over’, indeed!

I read a report by British Engine Boiler & Electrical Insurance Ltd about a catastrophic failure of an air receiver on a smallish excavator. It was a 350 psi vessel, charged either by a compressor driven by a small auxiliary engine on the excavator, or from an air bottle. The air was used to start the main engine.

The aux engine had broken down, and the site engineer charged the receiver using an air cylinder.
The following day, the operator took it upon himself to repeat the process using another cylinder.
The engine started OK, and charged the receiver ready for the following day.

When the operator was starting the engine the next day, the receiver exploded, unfortunately killing him.

The report said that explosive failure of receivers is not unknown, due to combustion of oily deposits within the vessel, following overheating in service. However, in this case it was found that charging had been done with an OXYGEN cylinder. It was concluded that:-

‘It is well-known that in an atmosphere of oxygen the spontaneous ignition temperature of many petroleum derivatives is considerably lower than in air and contact of oxygen with organic or easily oxidised material such as oily or greasy substances in the cylinder or associated pipework could have resulted in the formation of an explosive mixture. The rapid increase of pressure in the cylinder during the starting operation would result in considerable heat of compression which would serve to initiate combustion with explosive violence, and it was considered that the air receiver was disrupted by an explosion initiated by a flash-back from the engine cylinder. The starting system did not incorporate a non-return valve which would assist in preventing such an occurrence. It was subsequently learned that a severe flash-back was experinced when the engine was started by the same agency the day before, but unfortunately no significance was attached to the event.’
 
Tom, I had heard of the Aeronca starter but have never seen one and did not know the maker. I think it might be a great thing to reproduce for the homebuilt market. Look ma, no batteries.

Also, thae Napier starting mentioned above is similar to the WWI Fokker DVII method of starting. In the DVII with either the Mercedes or BMW engine, you had what was for all the world a hand crank telephone magneto on the panel. You gave it a shot of prime, pulled the prop though, cranked the starter mag and it just fired all cyls at once. It might try to run backwards at first, but eventually the cam timing would take over and it would spring to life. Advantage? A pilot could start his own plane without external help.
 
Rick

I don't know why your e-mail was returned, everything is OK this end as far as I know. I clicked on my e-mail icon and sent myself a test e-mail, that worked OK :(

Please try again if you have time. I am on dial-up, so maybe try one photo if it very large.
 
I am moving away from clockwork starters here, but mention of the Napier (a motor car engine?) reminds me that some of the car engines fitted with trembler ignition would start on the switch, occasionaly.

The one I seem to recall reading about was the Silver Ghost, a six cylinder which had magneto, but also trembler for starting. It would sometimes start simply by switching on the trembler ignition.

My own experience with trembler igntion (ex-Model T) was when given the job, as a schoolboy, of sawing firewood using an old Fairbanks Morse 'Z' with a dead magneto. The owner had rigged up the trembler box and a battery and made a lashed up brass fitting that something on the flywheel tripped every revolution - it started better than any mag Fairbanks ever did!

I am sure there are many stories/pranks that could be told involving those nicely boxed coils....

The impulse mag was pretty common on tractors, gives a healthy spark with the easiest of pulls on the crank handle...generally. I have the Fairbanks Morse impulse mag as a momento from our old Minneapolis-Moline.

I also have a slightly unusual Lucas V8 impulse mag ex Ford V8 fire pump, I guess these had to be able to be hand started, without battery.

The "trip" mag was an even simpler way of getting a good spark out of a mag at cranking speeds, as found on some stationary engines, eg Bosch '22', nicely made and still good nearly 100 years on.

I have read of early pre-electric starter schemes to introduce acetylene or similar gas into the cylinders for starting motor cars...

Mike mentions the hand cranked mag - I believe these were also used when starting the huge aero-engined cars that were raced at Brooklands in the early years. I have a frightening photo of one such Mercedes-engined car being pulled over with a massive (5 ft?) pipe or bar fitted to a socket on the crankshaft nose.
 
Peter,

We keep missing each other. I asked Steve Uphill to post a couple of pictures as he already had several. You can get there from his home page
( www.uphill.f9.co.uk )Ricks Mystery Motor.It is what I beieve to be a one off 8 cyl opposed 148 CI through hull vertically mounted inboard. Gear driven overhead cams, roller tip followers, unusual leaf springs to operate the valves. Vintage 1930s and may have been built to run in the old 151 inboard class and only weighs around 250 lbs.
I could certainly use some help from this group as I have exhausted all other sources.

Rick
 
I have observed diesel trucks with air starters, but not recently. Is this one of those ideas that has been relegated to history?
 
The thing on the instrument panel of the
DVII is called a "Booster Magneto" and was,
it seems, sort of problematic. I've seen
folks try to start their D7 using one, and
it never seemed to work very well. They
wound up hand propping it anyway.

Starting engines is easy, you just fold out
the kicker lever and give it a stab. Most
times that's how I start my drive to work
each day.


Jim
 








 
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