There is an old cat on ebay that the poster claims has a 'hydralic straight black pony motor'. I've never heard of that but even at my advanced age there is a lot to learn. Any of you know what this might be?

Sounds like he garbled "hydraulic straight blade and pony motor".

There has been air starters around but not hydraulic that I have seen. We had an air starter at the shop I used to start the big D375 & D386 & D397 Cat engines when they came in and didn,t have a starting engine on them so I could start them to dyno test run them.

"SJ" wrote:

There has been air starters around but not hydraulic that I have seen. We had an air starter at the shop I used to start the big D375 & D386 & D397 Cat engines when they came in and didn,t have a starting engine on them so I could start them to dyno test run them.

The company I work for used HYDROSTARTERS to start the Cummins/Cat deck engines on our pumping units. The powerpack (Detroit 4-71/BT-4 Cummins) was used to supply power for the various hydralic pumps, as well as powering the centrifugal pumps. They were electric start, and could always be jumped off the pickup, or the tractor in cold weather.

Our fracturing units (Cummins VTA-1710s/Detroit Diesel 16V-71 (92) use air starters, I believe our Cat 3512's use hydralic starters, but I would need to look.

I just posted lately on one of these sites that this Rail Road Co. here in Sayre Pa.had some big D17000s in some of their locomotives, 2 infact in each loco. and they had no start. engine but they motorized the big generator in them to turn the diesels so when I rebuilt several of them for them we borrowed a starting engine and bell housing and flywheel off a customer of ours to be able to start them for dyno testing.They also had a different lube system from the regular D17000 as the oil pump was outside the engine and if I recall they called it a triplex oil system, was a little different.

There's no limit to the ineptness of ebay sellers' descriptions...I saw an item listed the other day as "Antique John Deere Ford wrenches"...it was 3 rusty files...
Ron in CO...

I have heard of (but never seen) hydraulic starters for the rear engine of an International Harvester 433 or 444 twin-engine scraper.