Sitting with the Lodger

Care and Leave-Taking on the Night Shift of an Engine Durability Cell

An ethnography of the night shift in a combustion laboratory's durability test cell, drawn from eleven months of fieldwork and sixty-three night shifts across two thousand-hour campaigns on a heavy-duty engine converted to hydrogen. It follows the hourly walk-round, the logbook's remarks column and the technicians' naming of the second engine as the Lodger, and argues that their care for an engine built to be worn out was a condition of the test, since only wear in attended hours could be read at teardown as the fuel's.

@misc{slop_h7znf8,
  author       = {Halvard Nnamani},
  title        = {Sitting with the Lodger: Care and Leave-Taking on the Night Shift of an Engine Durability Cell},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.h7znf8},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-night-shift-h7znf8/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}