Again digressing from the thread. When I worked at Mothers Pride bakery Chesterfield 40 years ago we had a big 4-cylinder Paxman stand-by generator, which was a WW2 engine installed when the buildings had originally been an ammunition store. It generated enough electricity to drive the travelling plate ovens, light the building etc. but it couldn’t generate enough to maintain full production output. Once a month the maintenance department were supposed to run the Paxman, but for some reason they hadn’t bothered for several months when one day our national grid supply sub-station blew up. We went to start the Paxman, which started on stored compressed air. With being stood too long the air reservoir was empty. This was charged by a small Paxman petrol engine driven compressor. That wouldn’t start either because the petrol in the tank had lost its volatility. By the time we’d sent someone to get some fresh petrol and got the big Paxman going it was too late to save the bread. 6,000 loaves of bread had to be scrapped. What a palaver it was to start it. After that it had to be tested weekly, and we did need it on a couple of occasions afterwards. It leaked more oil than any Gardner did.
Edit: It also made one hell of a racket, it didn’t have a silencer, just a straight through exhaust pipe through the side of the shed where it was housed. Impossible to talk to anyone else in the shed with you when it was running.