Industrial engines appeal to Canadian collector

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Walter Dedman's 132-hp Ruston & Hornsby, above, serial no.345539, is a size 9X, class HRC

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Walter Dedman of Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, thinks nothing of hauling one of his trio of rare English oil engines to antique equipment shows around the province - despite their heft. The two biggest ones even have their own specially made, deluxe flatbed trailers, on which they're permanently mounted for travel and display.

Walter's biggest engine is a 500-hp, made in 1927 by Ruston & Hornsby Ltd. in Lincoln, England. Its companions are a 1949, 132-hp Ruston & Hornsby, and a 7-hp Blackstone, also made in England.

Neither brand was ever sold inside the United States, Walter says, and only one agent for each was in Canada: Laurie & Lamb in Montreal sold Ruston & Homsbys, and the Canada Foundry Co., Ltd., in Toronto sold Blackstones.

Both of Walter's Ruston & Hornsbys are cold-start engines that use airless atomizers. He says many U.S. engines had to be heated to start and that was not always a practical situation as far north as Canada. Also, these engines ran on oil, the most economical of fuels for the time.

500-hp Ruston & Hornsby

The 500 dates to 1927 and was installed in the winter of 1927-28 in a pumping station operated by the city of Kitchener, Ontario. 'It was not used a lot,' Walter explains. 'Its purpose was to supply water to the city of Kitchener when normal power was down.'

Walter has had the engine since 1968, having saved it from being turned into scrap - but he's known of it since he was a child. 'I was born in 1931,' he says, 'and when I was a kid, my uncle lived not far from Kitchener. He took pigs to Schneiders, a packing plant there, and sometimes I would go with him. Along the way, we'd come to this building, with the lawn mowed and the bushes all trimmed, and I used to look at it and wonder what was in it.

'This engine was in it. The engine was moved with horses from the railway station to that site, and the building was built around it.' To move the engine to his place, Walter had to remove one of the building's brick walls, take the engine out piece by piece, and then replace that wall.

Originally, the engine came with a 375 KVA, at 2,200 volts, AC General Electric (GE) generator, plus a 14 KVA, DC exciter. 'In the late 1950s,' Walter says, 'they changed everything in this country from 25 to 60 cycle, and this engine became obsolete then.' Kitchener city workers took the generator out and sent it to GE to be converted to a 60 cycle and changed the pump motors in the pumping house, but the smallest (pump) was 600 hp, which the engine couldn't run. In addition, Walter adds, the big Ruston & Hornsby engines were guaranteed, but for the guarantee to remain valid, detailed statistics had to be kept, and that rarely happened.

• FaceBook
• Digg
• Delicious

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print