Richard W. wrote:

Thre are two sorts of heating oil. 25 sec and 35sec. (That's how we
measure the viscosity in the UK.) 25sec (kerosine) is for
vapourising burners. [Basically a big wick]
35 sec (= to diesel) for pressure jet burners.
25 sec can be burnt in a petrol engine. However the engine needs to
be hot before it will run. In days of yore some agricultural tractors
ran on this (known as Tractor Vapourising Oil). They had two tanks,
you started the tractor on petrol & then switch over to the kerosine /
TVO Smelly exhaust.

I have seen some of those tractors, but the more common one is the
International which is started on gas and switched over to diesel when it
got warm. Some of those engines are fairly large.


My late father had an International TD9 that started on gasoline and
then changed over to diesel, but my understanding is that it was simply
because hand-cranking a diesel engine like that was impractical, not
because it needed to warm up. The compression ratio was much lower when
it was in gasoline mode, and cranking was far easier.

Perce