The Weirdest Diesel Engine Ever
Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk
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This is how the weirdest diesel engine ever built sounds.
Bizarre. Wrong by every instinct. And yet that sound powered some of the hardest-working trucks on earth for nearly two decades — across British roads, across the Australian outback, and beneath the transporter that carried championship-winning racing cars to the grid.
Two-stroke architecture. Six pistons sharing three cylinders. No valves, no camshaft, no serious rival in its class. One point two million proven miles across a single fleet of eight trucks, on routes that should have destroyed it — and a power output that shamed diesels twice its size.
And then, by nineteen seventy-two, it was gone. So why did Britain throw away the one thing nobody else could build?
This is the story of the Commer TS three. And it starts with one engineer who looked at every rule in diesel design and decided to break all of them at once.