Distilates???? What,why,when,advantages,disadvantages???

Me with TOO much time on my hands again!

What EXACTLY is "distilates"??? I see some Ms have distilate carbs.I think I read somewhere it was cheap to buy at one point??? Was it any good to use????

As usuall,looking for all the "dirty details" on the subject! lol

Cheaper than gas, in WWII it was probably more available than gas. Kerosene is similar. Both are lower on the refining scale than gas and produce less HP. There is currently 0 advantage to them, only kerosene is currently available. HOWEVER, IH said that an engine ran best on the fuel for which it was designed. Supposedly that means that a kerosene engine will produce more HP on kero than gas -- not sure I believe that.

Distillate fuel requires less refining then gasoline or even kerosene for that matter. Since it is cheaper to refine it was less to buy. This was the advantage to this the down side was lower power out put due to the low compression of a distillate burning engine. Example of this would be the Farmall M you mention they have around 34/35hp ias a distillate and 39/40 hp as a high compression gas. If the compression of a distillate is too high generally over 4 to 4.5 to 1 it will have a tendency to knock. Another factor to consider when burning distillate is that it does not fully burn in the chamber and can dilute the crank case oil. You would back off the top petcock on the oil pan everyday and drain off the un-burned fuel. There is a ton more info out there on this just google it and im sure you can find out more facts.
here is what distillate fuel oil is made of

Were distilate engines "start on gas" like the true diesel Ms were????? Did they have the small "starter tank" on it????

Yes. The engine was started by draining the Distillate from the carb and switching to gasoline to fill it from the small tank. Then when warmed to operating temp (shutters on the radiator closed) the gasoline was shut off, and distillate was turned on.
The petro cracking technologies of the pre WWII refineries did not include the catylitic and pressure vessel reactors of today. Thus the distillate was cheap residual(almost a waste product)of gasoline production.
The oil was drained down to the lower petcock, then refilled with new 30wt daily to the top petcock to retain lubricity in the oil, limiting dillution. Jim

In addition to all the good comments by others, let me expand a little on the catalyst / refining comment.
The technology in oil refineries has advanced a lot. You can probably remember when diesel was a lot cheaper than gas. I can remember in the 60's when diesel fuel was about half the cost of gasoline. Part of the reason is that the refineries were not able to convert as much of a barrel of oil to gasoline back then as they can today. So the diesel and the lesser products, such as distillate, were almost a waste product in the quest to get as much gasoline as possible. So in order to get X amount of gasoline out of a barrel of oil, you ended up with Y amount of diesel and other lesser valued products, such as distillate, bunker fuel, asphalt, coke, paraffin wax, etc. Today, a barrel of oil yields a lot bigger X percent of gasoline and the Y amount of lesser valued products is smaller. This is due to advances in refinery processes and catalysts.
Kind of the same thing with propane tractors. Propane is obtained by processing natural gas. Initially there was a limited market for propane, and it was cheap compared to gasoline. The US natural gas industry really took off after WW II, with pipelines laid to all parts of the country. The natural gas had to be processed to remove the heavier hydrocarbons (ethane, propane, butane) so that they would not condense and form liquid slugs in the pipelines, particulary in cold weather. So there was a lot of cheap propane available on the market.
Distillate and propane tractors were attempts to utilize a cheap alternative to gasoline. Both fuels could be used in a lightly modified gasoline engine rather than a more expensive diesel engine.

I can"t add any more to what"s been said! Overseas "distillate" was called TVO or "Tractor Vaporizing Oil".

Start on gasoline to get everything good and hot and then switch to distillate. Manual recommends switching back to gasoline for shutdown so carb is ready to go for next start.

There was a story on YT a while back about a guy running an "All fuel" John Deere A on Diesel. Tractor had to stay plenty hot or plugs would just foul out.

I"m slowly working on putting the parts together to make a "distillate" M. So many were switched to gasoline in the 50"s that it"s somewhat difficult to find the manifolds and shutters and such. I"m making progress but it"s a long term project.

Dad use to mix kerosene and diesel and run it in our "kerosene" M. Why Dad did that I dont recall, but I do recall the 2 "gas cans" 5 gallons of each. Dad would always put a burlap bag on the grill after he started it, it would run 30 minutes or so, switch tanks, and away he'd go. It would get the snot worked out of when he would do that, and I can still remember the smoke coming out or the muffler when hed drop that disc, and after a few minutes it would clear up.

(quoted from post at 10:15:41 03/16/12) Dad use to mix kerosene and diesel and run it in our "kerosene" M. Why Dad did that I dont recall, but I do recall the 2 "gas cans" 5 gallons of each.

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Mixing in diesel had to be kinda tough to live with for the sparkers?

As a side note, where I grew up it was practice to mix fuels in the era of 15-30 and 22-36 machines. They ran too hot on straight gas when heavy loaded but gas was much nicer to use for chore work. As a trade off winter work often would be straight gas while summer would be mostly kerosene or distillate with the ratio shifting as the seasons passed.

John I have a 1937 John Deere D that I bought back in the mid 60's. It has the water injection and shutters on it to run distilate. In the late 60's you couldn't find anybody that could get distilate in this area. I found two older farmers that had farmed with D's and they told me to use a 50/50 mixture of number2 diesel and gasoline. It runs good on it but you do have to play with shutters and water injection till you get the right combination. I used a hotter spark plug (w-18) on this mixture.

(reply to post at 08:30:10 03/16/12)

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I remember Dad having a 1942 JD B and a 1940 A that had the small starter tank, but as far as I can remember he ran gasoline in both... used the small tank as an auxillary tank to get him home when the main ran out. I remember the small tank as having a red cap and the big one a green. Maybe there were mods done to the engine to allow gasoline, but I don't know.

I'm thinking jet fuel would work. I believe its a shade lighter than kerosene and more highly refined.

Jet fuel and Kerosene are one and the same.

(quoted from post at 17:12:15 03/16/12) Jet fuel and Kerosene are one and the same.

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Jet A and A-1 are kerosene based, but the additives change the properties from plain kerosene. Anti-static, anti-occidents, iceing inhibitors, etc., are added. Jet B for extreme cold weather is naptha-kerosene based and will ignite at a lower temperature. Jet A or A-1 should be interchangable with plain kerosene, but I wouldn't want to use plain kerosene in a jet engine, except in an emergency, where it no doubt would burn.

to give a description of the property of the fuels according to the owners manual for a m or h kerosine is 0 octtane, distillate is 36 octane and gasoline is 70 octane. different parts of the country embraced gasoline later than others. most later low compression tractors, like a 450, were used on the southern plantations because less power was overcame by useing more tractors and the hired help couldn't steal the fuel and put in their cars.

IH offered three different compression ratios for the model H.

High compression gasoline 5.9
Combination gasoline-distillate 4.75
Kerosene 4.5

Presumably these three options would have been available for all Letter Series engines.

In the Nebraska Test of the Distillate burning H the fuel had an Octane rating of 37.

For the Gasoline engine Test the Octane rating was 71.

Maximum Belt HP Gasoline: 26.2
Fuel consumption: 0.532 lb per HP hour.

Maximum Belt HP Distillate: 23.31
Fuel consumption: 0.604 lb per HP hour.

At one time I had an H with a kerosene head and ran up quite a few hours burning jet fuel. The manifold heat control valve was set in the mid position (it was seized) and seemed to vaporise the fuel OK.
For efficient operation the Owner"s Manual says to keep the pointer of the Heat Indicator at the top end of the green segment. This was easy enough to do under constant load, but when the load varied to any great degree it meant making continual adjustments to the radiator shutters. A real pain !

Sid.