The Payá 2 cc model diesel from Spain was a notably close copy of the early variant of the 2 cc E.D. Mk. II diesel which had first appeared in Britain in February 1947. In basic design terms, it was far more similar to the E.D. than its somewhat different external appearance might suggest. It was designed by three students at the Naval Academy in Marin, Galicia, seemingly as a design exercise counting towards their graduation grades.  The original name of the engine was the ICA 2 cc diesel.

Beginning in early 1948, the ICA diesel was manufactured to quite good standards in nearby Pontevedra, a coastal city in the autonomous community of Galicia in north-west Spain. It was in fact the first model diesel to enter series production in Spain.

The actual manufacturer was the Pazó precision engineering company, whose main business was the construction of compact full-sized diesel engines for use in the fishing industry. Although their full-sized marine diesels were very good indeed, they don't seem to have had a really good appreciation of the finer points of model diesel construction, because their 2 cc diesel embodied a number of design and construction flaws which actually prevented some (but not all) of the engines from running without owner intervention.

The engine's distribution was soon taken over by the very large Payá Hermanos (Payá Brothers) toy company of Ibi in Alicante, who ordered a production run of 2,000 flywheeel-equipped units in late 1948. These were originally scheduled to be used to power a range of ready-to-run model boats, but the boats never materialized, leaving the engines to be sold on their own under the Payá name as general-purpose model powerplants. As a result of this well-publicised sales effort, the engine is generally known today as the Payá 2 cc diesel.

It's possible that the afore-mentioned operational difficulties with some of the engines played a part in the Payá  company's decision to abandon the model boat project. While very elegant in appearance, the design and execution of the compression adjustment system were both seriously flawed in operational terms. A number of other design flaws were also apparent, as mentioned earlier.

The engine was mostly sold in its flywheel-equipped boat/car form, but the Payá company also offered accessory components to convert the engine to aero use. It appears that no further production took place after the delivery of the large 2,000 unit order from Payá. This is understandable given the fact that the engine was at heart an early 1947 design which was woefully out-dated by that time.

A full review and test of this interesting engine appears elsewhere on this website.