The MAN .19 appeared in Model Airplane News (MAN) for April through July, 1956. This was MAN's third and final foray into publishing a complete set of plans and instructions for a model engine that could be home-built with modest equipment. As regular readers and Members will know, the earlier designs were the Simplex 25 sparkie (1947), and the Little Dragon 049 glow (1950).
For some time, I'd intended to complete the triptych and re-draft the MAN 19. News of the designer's passing moved this forward and looking at the plans, I decided that maybe a cut and paste job would do as they were drawn by Ted himself and one of my usual CAD redraws would loose that certain something. Alas, the text in my old, yellowed MAN issues was none too clear when scanned, so the pages that follow have been assembled by converting the scans to text using optical character recognition (OCR) followed by spell-checking. They were then edited together, removing the "next month, last month" references, and some rather obvious typos fixed. Finally, the text was split into component group pages as dictated by the plan sheets.
The engine itself is suitable for a model engine builder with two or three diesels already under their belt. The MAN Editor introduced the series with these words:
"More than six years ago, MAN published two home-built engine projects which, surprisingly enough, were well received. Pictures of reader-built engines have been received ever since. Not a novelty, but a "real" engine, the MAN .19 falls within the capabilities of the amateur and student machinist."
The design was the work of Mr EC "Ted" Martin, whose achievements in this and other related fields were considerable, as can be read on the Ted Martin Tribute Page. Even if you do not build the engine, reading Ted's words will teach you a thing or two about model engines, their design, construction, and especially why it is not practical for anyone to say just how long an engine may take to run-in. Of more importance, he explains ways in which you can, if not careful, run it out in the process!
Ted included an AMCO-like glow head conversion and a pulse jet like reed valve as part of the final section. At the very end, Ted asks for readers to write in and asks what they'd like to see next, a gas turbine, perhaps? I can't imagine that even he would have imagined that less than 40 years later, that is exactly what home builders would be doing.
