Vintage Lister J to R Fuel / Oil Pump Information

When it comes to working out the finer details of the fuel and oil pumps fitted to the J to R range engines it can be a bit of a minefield. To help navigate the way we have put together the following guide with the very kind assistance of Rob Johnson in Australia, it is by no means considered to be the final word on the subject so please feel free to submit any suggestions if you feel that we have missed anything out.

We know of four different pump designs that were fitted to the Lister J to R range of vintage stationary engines, the first type (type 1) is a single fuel pump only, very rare as they were only fitted to the first engines in 1909 and 1910, these engines had the fuel tank cast in the base and you see them most commonly with the lifting eye on the head.

The second type, being the first of the dual fuel and oil pump design, which we refer to as type 2, has hollow plungers and a much longer spring that goes up inside the plunger (refer to image “Type 2”), it is not shown in the drawing but the plunger is hollow for about half its length and the spring goes up inside this.

The type 3 pumps had no gland nuts (refer to image “Type 3”), these plungers where machined on the bottom end to allow for the packing to be wrapped around followed by a keeper ring that the spring pushed against.

And finally the type 4 pump (refer to image “Type 4”), this one is pretty self-explanatory, the plungers we make available here are reproduced from this pump. Please refer to the below details for what these new plungers will fit.

1) The new plungers will not fit the type 1 pumps, they have a slightly larger diameter. As I indicated earlier though, these are not very common, they were only found of the first 500 or so engines, and not many have survived.

2) They will fit the type 2 pumps with the hollow plungers, but the spring will need to be upgraded to the new shorter spring available here, this basically turns them in to a type 4 pump.

3) They are not suitable for type 3 pumps without modification, the bottom end will need to be machined down to duplicate what the drawing shows. The type 3 pump is not that common as far as we know, about 95% of the pumps we have seen  are the type 2 or type 4 pumps, and this is in line with what we hear from others as well. From what we can tell, it was established quite quickly that the type 3 design was not too good out in the field and the design quickly went back to the gland nut type, it may have only been in production for a couple of years at best as far as we can tell?

4) Fits all the type 4 pumps, and we find this is the most common pump. There was also another variation, which we refer to as a type 5 but this was only used the early Lister CS engines, the first of these diesels started out using the J to R range dual fuel and oil pumps, the fuel side was capped off and only the oil side was used, there were a few variations in these pumps as well before they eventually went the dedicated single plunger oil pump design we all know of commonly found on the Lister CS.

Lister J to R fuel & oil pump type 2	Lister J to R fuel & oil pump type 3	Lister J to R fuel & oil pump type 4