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You mentioned one of my favorite old pieces of iron the D7. Another advantage to the starting engine is that you can turn the diesel over, without too much difficulty even in the coldest of temperatures because of the compression lever. While you are spinning the diesel, the coolant gets warmed up by the starting engine, you get hot air from the starting engine exhaust into the diesel's intake manifold, and you are circulating crankcase oil in the diesel, waiting until you see pressure registering on the gauge. The key to it is to make sure that starting engine is in good working order, good compression, clean carb, fuel supply, and ignition. Magneto firing a hot spark, plenty of fuel coming into the carb bowl, motor in decent shape with good compression, they will fire off on a hand crank, mine still does, although the electric starter certainly is the preference for cold weather starting a pony motor. If the diesel has decent compression, and no other fuel related problems it'll fire easily after some spin time, I've never had to use ether on mine. Some people regard those old starting engines as a royal pain in the @ss, and they can be if you don't take care of them. I would enjoy hearing how a direct electric start would function on a 0 deg day, for one of these old technology diesels, the starting engine wins hands down in my opinion A few years ago, one of my hockey buddies parked his mighty brand new chevy 4x4 on a sideslope in 3 + feet of snow, it was between 0-10 degrees F that day. Obviously a bad choice, plenty of flat ground to park on, not sure what the deal was, but there was no getting out. We had a nice area of ice cleared, say 18-24" thick, so I told him he's going to have to get a running start from the ice to have a shot at making it, too much snow, too much slope. Well, time to fire up the ole Cat, it's now dark, the pony needed some work, had not gotten to it yet, had to change the oil in it etc. so it took awhile, then it's got weak spark on one cylinder, but eventually that evening, I got that pony to fire on both and running strong enough to turn the diesel, the latter of which almost did not happen, and he would have paid heavily for a wrecker, listened to some flak from his wife etc. Well I just let that pony do it's thing, and tried the compression lever with the 2 spd trans in Low, and it just wanted to bog right down and out, so it took some fiddling around, back and forth, you usually can't and are probably not supposed to fire the diesel while the starting engine is in low gear, (though mine will fire in low, can't do that, it will overspeed the pony). The diesel engine is tight with low hours since new, so it's got excellent compression and is hard to spin in the cold. Eventually I got it to turn in high gear, with compression on, pulled up the throttle lever and one cylinder starts popping, then 2 then all 4 with some nice white plumes/smoke rings of unburnt diesel, which cleared quickly, then all 4 were firing smoothly. I pushed a path down to the ice and boy is a 7A blade (12 ft angle blade) nice for pushing snow, backed down to the edge, and hooked a line to his truck, pulled him up the hill, almost slid back down into him when making the turn around to get out of his way, now 10Pm, what a night, but one thing that I think made the difference was that starting engine, hard to believe how a direct electric start would have been able to get that diesel to fire in those temperatures, the 20 something HP starting engine had all could do to make it happen, and they used it on the D8 as well, which was the same diesel motor, but 2 more cylinders to turn. Models that came out years later, whereas the engine technology changed them for the better, direct electric start probably began to improve drastically, but for these old slow turning, lower compression naturally aspirated diesels like in the old Cats, a starting engine really seems to be what you need in bitter cold. When I was a kid, my father had one on the farm and a blizzard brought 4 feet of snow, '71 '72 I forget, was so bad it closed the state highway here, and his (which I still have) old D7 started up on a bitter cold day, the town asked him if he could help clear the road, was an emergency, the snow drifted into the rock cut pass the road went through, they could not break through it and everything else was bogged down or stuck, the state crews included. That old D7 cleared a couple miles of road in short order, open station, he went right through that big ole drift, some years ago I found the receipt for the work done, I think they paid him $60 for doing this.
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