more 1-cyl engines to come

Chinese copies of the Yanmar horizontal single engines are selling like hot cakes. Now gotta take a bunch of those to Mozambique.

Just finished the installation of a horizontal single engine in a Mitsubishi Lancer

It may seem crazy at first, but not that bad at all while driving. Now that everything fits, it's time to mock-up the turbocharging setup to make it fully roadworthy.

Just coming back from a week in China

Bringing 10 new horizontal single cylinder engines along. Half of them are 18hp and the other ones 22hp, suitable to retrofits into multicabs to replace the 2-stroke 550cc petrol engines.

Horizontal single-cylinder engines are there to stay

We can eventually get rid of the unpleasant looks of the kuliglig, but its essence might last longer. Retrofits of the same good old horizontal single-cylinder engine type used in the kuliglig can be performed in old cars with longitudinal engines, regardless of FWD or RWD. Chinese copies of Yanmar TF/TS or CY engines are cheap and plentiful, so why not to give'em a chance?

Why not to give vegetable oils a chance?

Cheaper to produce and requiring fewer industrial processing than biodiesel, vegetable oils are a great option to enhance the living standards in rural communities and to provide a cleaner fuel for urban transportation. Instead of relying on the economic, political and social pressure of the OPEC mafia, why not to develop an indigenous source of fuels suitable to the most distinct regional realities? And vegetable oils also perform well on older engines, actually better than regular diesel oil.

Singapore again. Waiting for the next plane to Manila, and then some vacations in the mountains. Baguio maybe?

It was a huge surprise to figure out that I would have to work on a Drott hot-bulb engine again. That was a '62 model still fitted to a small fishing boat.

How could we expect CNG to work for Venezuelan people if its availability is still limited?

Natural Gas is really going to save Venezuela? I don't think so.

The seemingly-Nazi government of Venezuela had ambitious plans to increase the usage of Natural Gas as an automobile fuel in the domestic market in order to save cash from the subsidies currently applied to keep the prices of petrol and Diesel fuel artificially low and leave more crude oil and its byproducts to be exported at international market prices and put some dollars in the crippled Venezuelan economy. Installation of CNG fuel systems, dubbed "dual fuel system", is sponsored by the local oil & gas company PDVSA for both public service and private vehicles, either retrofits in used vehicles or OEM installations at importers and the few local auto manufacturing plants that are still active. It's a country that imports about 80% of all the food it consumes, and already facing scarcity of staple items such as bread, and even McDonald's had to replace Argentinian potatoes with locally-sourced cassava roots to keep the McFries available. Meanwhile, the dictator Nicolas Maduro set an agreement with the Palestinian Authority to supply Hamas with all the Diesel fuel it is going to need to keep its terrorist attacks against Israel. Well, any reasonably-minded person can agree that it would make more sense to support the few heroes who insist to develop the agriculture in Venezuela, not just to provide food to their fellow countrymen but due to the potential to develop a range of low-complexity alternative fuels too. And why not shoehorn some Isuzu 4JA1, 4JB1 or 4BC2 into those landyachts that are all around with their boat-anchor V8 engines thirsty for some petrol?

Finishing this journey in Suriname. An interesting country, one of the few countries with traffic to the left in the Americas, but there is no restriction on whether the steering wheel and the pedals are.