Making Distillate Fuels

Discussion in 'Back to Basics' started by deMolay, Dec 24, 2018.


  1. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    I have acquired and am rebuilding a 1930/40's era 2 cylinder water cooled John Deere LUC engine. These engines are low compression and apparently could be run on distillate fuel, kerosene, gasoline and diesel fuels. Yo started them up on gasoline and got temperature up to 130F then switched to distillate or kero etc. My question is how can I make distillate fuel. These engines were skid mounted and could be used to run any homestead equipment, generators, pumps, saws, hydraulics etc. Up to their horse power capacity. They are also 100% EMP proof. They start with a crank.
     
  2. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    The only engines that will be truly be EMP proof are those simple diesel engiens.

    There are also various degrees of EMP.
    EMP, The Electromagnetic Pulse
     
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  3. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    I think anything with electronics would not make it, for example I have a 1948 cj2a jeep, it starts with a crank, it has no electronics. Most experiments have found that mainly vehicles with onboard computers or electronics will fail. This engine has no electronics it has only an electrical pulse that is generated when you crank the handle.
     
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  4. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    From here -
    What is Distillate Fuel? - Definition from Corrosionpedia

    "A distillate fuel is any one of the wide variety of fuels obtained from fractions boiling above the temperature at which gasoline comes off in the distillation of petroleum. All of the fuel oil classes are refined from crude petroleum and may be categorized as either a distillate fuel or a residual fuel depending on the method of production. Distillate fuels consist of diesel oils and fuel oils.

    Distillate products known as No. 1, No. 2 and No. 4 diesel fuel are used in on-highway diesel engines as well as off-highway engines. Products known as No. 1, No. 2 and No. 4 fuel oils are used primarily for space heating and electric power generation."

    So there you have it, distillate fuels are all petroleum products.
     
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  5. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    It depends on the pulse.
    There was a test done with early 2000s vehicles using a reasonably strong emp and it only damaged one of the test vehicles.
    To get the kill everything emp you have to be located very close to a thermonuclear detonation but not directly under it, the weapon has to be set off up in the thermosphere and you have to be to the east or west of the blast, not too close and not too far away.
    It's so specific you would have to be targeted by the enemy.
    But it will for sure fry the power grid and jam communications for a day.
     
  6. Is this a diesel or a hit or miss engine.
     
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  7. Cruisin Sloth

    Cruisin Sloth Special & Slow

    Both have mags on them , gas with spark plug , green one has a gear reduction JD and red one is using the camshaft and it's speed for the output . I have judged the red one & partner Judge did the JD green
    Sloth
     
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  8. Altoidfishfins

    Altoidfishfins Monkey+++ Site Supporter+

    Years ago I looked into alcohol as a motor fuel (now that's alcohol abuse!) and checked a book on the subject out of the local library. This was maybe late 70s, long before internet.

    Anyway, the book was titled "Brown's Alcohol Motor Fuel Cookbook" and I believe it was written some time in the mid '30s. Probably long out of print but it had good info. A copy may still be able to be found on-line somewhere.
     
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  9. arleigh

    arleigh Goophy monkey

    Those hit/miss gas engines were good for irrigation water pumps and very small operations but not much more, rated at 1 or 2 horse power . they rely heavily on inertia of their big fly wheel.
    Early gas engines up till the mid 1980s used magnetos coils and points ,pretty much EMP proof , but now every thing has electronic ignition, solid state . vulnerable to EMP, and in my opinion NOT as reliable .
    Electronic ignition only made manufacturing cheaper, not necessarily better quality .
     
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  10. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    It is neither a pure diesel or a hit and miss engine. It is somewhere in between. They are low compression, and run on low octane fuels. They are in the 15-20 HP range.
     
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  11. Airtime

    Airtime Monkey+++

    You could make ethanol or methanol alcohol to potentially run your internal combustion engine. Unless you have an oil well and get into a small scale refinery, making distillate fuels is probably not in the cards.

    I think a much better SHTF fuel for running a generator, water/irrigation pump, line shaft for machine shop, etc. is to go with a wood gasification unit. There are lots of plans, even .gov plans for wood gas units that can power small (20-35 HP) tractors for small scale and truck farming. There are lots of plans and videos on the web and even an annual meet-up event (or used to be, not sure if still going) in Argos, Indiana.

    There are some threads in the archives for wood gas.

    AT
     
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  12. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    I appreciate all your input. I will try and find that fuel cookbook. The original diesel engine, designed by Rudolph Diesel, was for farm use, with farm fuels that were made on the farm from various bio mass. I am thinking this is somewhat like that in regards to the fuel. Except the fuels used were not home made but cheaper grades byproducts of the oil distillation process. A lower grade fuel than kerosene. What they used to call coal oil, which was a cheap lamp fuel.
     
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  13. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    Thanks, do not intend to set up a refinery obviously. But am trying to understand the fuel options, all of them for this class of old engine. The JD. LUC engine was a general purpose utility engine for farm use. It was used as a tractor engine, small combine engine, and a portable power unit for various farm operations.
     
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  14. Tully Mars

    Tully Mars Metal weldin' monkey

    You're gonna be farther ahead to just run gas for day to day stuff. I only use non ethanol in mine. My Farmall tractor and power plants are all set up to run on kerosene. The reason was back in the 30's-40's kerosene was a lot cheaper than gas. These things were made to farm with all day everyday and the kero was the cheaper fuel. Nowadays that certainly isn't true. For the prepper Kerosene has a longer shelf life as a stored fuel compared to gas even treated gas, and I have a couple of barrels set aside. However for day to day stuff (I really use my tractors and power plants) I use gasoline.
     
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  15. UncleMorgan

    UncleMorgan I like peeling bananas and (occasionally) people.

    Generally speaking (YMMV) growing food to make fuel may be less efficient than trading food for fuel after TSHTF. For a while, anyway. It may also be very inefficient timewise before TSHTF.

    If there is enough food on the farm to make fuel, make the kind that people can drink, because booze is always prime tradegoods.

    Referring to the recent posts about food shortages in the near future, the only thing better than growing "organic" vegetables is growing freeze-dried organic vegetables.

    Any monkeys in or near Cen. FL with an interest in doing that on a commercial basis is invited to drop me a PM. I used to own a lab that freeze-dried snake venom, and I have some proprietary info on that sort of stuff that a food producer would find very beneficial.
     
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  16. Gator 45/70

    Gator 45/70 Monkey+++

    Well there you go! Jack up the back end,Put a rim only on one side and run your belt to what ever piece of equipment your wanting to use.
     
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  17. SB21

    SB21 Monkey+++

    I've thought of hooking up a charging system to a Hit and Miss engine to charge batteries for the home . anyone know any downfalls to this idea ?
     
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  18. deMolay

    deMolay Monkey+

    I would never use good food for fuel, I was thinking biomass fuels. etc.Gasoline or diesel may not always be available. We are trying to set up as if at some point we may have to live like great grandpa. For example I could use this to run an alternator to charge our solar batteries when we hit periods of low sun. Then switch to running a buzz saw for firewood etc. General purpose utility engine.
     
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  19. duane

    duane Monkey+++

    Used to get drip gas that came out of gas wells and was used in old tractors without distillation. Best of old mags were impulse, they wound up and snapped over when hand cranked and fired to give a much hotter spark and retard timing to save your wrist. Were the highest development possible at the time, lower octane engines often used some heat, either ahead of time or on carb to help vaporize the fuel. Used to list three types of fuel engines, petrol which used a spark and ran on a liquid fuel, gas which ran on a gaseous fuel and did not use a carb to vaporize the fuel, and compression ignition which used compression to ignite a fuel sprayed into the cylinder or a combination of compression and a hot surface, like model airplane engines with glow plugs, to create the power stroke. Wood or coal or natural gas engines using the gas from the city gas lines existed in the early days and building a gassifier to make a gas to run a gas engine is actually quite practical for a stationary engine, mounting it on a moving platform becomes a problem of weight and space, thus a tractor in which you need the weight to put traction on the wheels is much more practical than a truck where you want to increase the weight moved. Wood gas engines were the most used, but using coal, steam, and high temps to create producer gas, old city gas, would be most efficient. Can't say that a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen would be the safest thing to use however.
     
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  20. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    What's wrong with something like a lister diesel, the single cylinder ones can be pull started.
     
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