I went down a rabbit hole lately and found this article on tiny diesel engines built throughout the past decades, most of them model engines: https://modelenginenews.org/techniques/minid.html

> I've seen collectors turn a greenish blue and stammer out crazy offers on sight of my 0.1cc Nano, pictured here. But as the size goes down, construction difficulty and criticality of "fits" goes up exponentially.

Related? Blondihacks [1] has been working through machining a live-steam powered scale locomotive.

Has it been three years now? She easily has another year of work ahead of her before she has live, rolling stock. Wild dedication to a project that could perhaps consume half a decade of your life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Blondihacks

Some Model Engineering related resources:

1. Engineering drawings of small model engines used for model aircrafts. They are designed for manufacturing and working, not not like showcase item. We can actually build them.

https://outerzone.co.uk/plans.asp?cat=Engines&Xcardsperpage=...

2. https://modelenginenews.org/midge/index.html

This is great. If you enjoyed it you should check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IEGmD_aV3w . Next to that it’s child’s play. That’s a whole trasatlantic’s engine room from scratch.

The second I heard that engine fire it was 1986 in my brain again. I could smell the fuel and feel the finger damage from repeatedly trying to get the darned thing to start. Followed by damage on the other side of the finger when it actually did. Ouch.

Last century I was gifted a gas powered model helicopter with one of these small gas engines. It had a propeller would fly up, run out of gas and fall back down (it had some larger blades to slow its decent).

You started by spinning the propeller and letting it spring back.

How I didn’t loose a finger…

They’re remarkable little devices.

Sorry for offtopic, I want to share,

Some Machining related channels on youtube:

this old tony, Chronova engineering, cylo's garage, inheritance machining, breaking taps, blondie hacks, tarkka, dan gelbert, Jonesey Makes, Eric(with a K), Clough42, Alec steele, NBR Works, Not An engineer, Stefan Gotteswinter, oxtoolco, ROBRENZ, MrCrispin, Clickspring, Artisan Makes, MH Anything, Jellyfish machine,Maker B,

And also there is great course on precision engineering by Alex slocum:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLksE8LDXGXl_MQHKr2DqhfD...

If you want to see the engine running it's at 30:12

I skipped some bits of the video so probably missed this, but: in the beginning he mentioned no spark or glow plugs and said “similar to a diesel”, but in the end that didn’t work and he had to resort to a glow plug.

Did he mention what fuel he was using for the compression-only attempts? If not actual diesel, it seems like he would have had to use ether or something like that.

I just noticed that this channel has 2 million views and only four videos, all from about a year ago!