Hold on you guys don't attack the messenger. You can't have it both ways by saying its OK to mount a Listeroid on skids and support it with some comments about a Briggs or the fact that you haven't seen a broken crank. No offence but: Who are you anyway? How long have you been around? Are you an engineer? The discussion clearly explains the reasons why the manufacturer recommended the mounting method and why it is necessary.
If you were going to depend on it 24/7 and work it's ass off You might be interested in knowing these things. I know I am. What you do with the information is your gig. Build it your way but don't discount the facts just because YOU are not doing it. Argue the facts. I learned a ton of information from this thread and it only took 30 minutes to read. I look forward to many more threads like this. Don't fuck that up for the rest of us.
I had a 3 way conversation many years ago with a rigger who built a 75 mile ropeway carrying god knows how many 40 ton payload coal carrying cars from the mine to the railhead (Maamba collieries in Zambia up to the railhead near Choma) and a guy who worked for Otis specifying lifts.
Lifts (at the time anyway) for carrying human cargo had an 8x safety factor, that meant if it was rated to carry ten / twelve people at an average weight of 200 lbs each the lift had to operate normally and within parameters when the car was loaded with 8 ton of sandbags.
The ropeway wasn't carrying humans, and travelled over jungle, but downtime was a bitch.
The conversation started about long splices in the cables that didn't increase diameter of cable or resistance to bending or reduce strength significantly, people able to do this work may not work that often, but it is (or was) a skill so rare they could write their own cheques and behave any way they chose.
That conversation soon degenerated when the guys who rigged the cranes and winches joined in (these were general purpose things like you'd find in any junk or construction yard)
The crane and winch guys poo-pooed all that the rigger and Otis guy were saying, basically all the same arguments and excuses you see here, over kill, technology has moved on, new materials, never seen one break anyway, blah blah blah.
The rigger and Otis guy were more like, it is not enough that it never breaks in service, and never means never, but it can't fail in service either, and even if it did fail in theory that failure had better be minimal, confined, and easy and cheap and fast to get the system back up and running.
What killed / closed the argument was a comment from the Otis guy, "you blokes fuck up, you maybe kill yourselves and cost the company a few thousand in downtime, we fuck up and we kill a bunch of civilians, never work again as long as we live, and maybe bankrupt the company with the lawsuit and bad rep that follows."
One of the crane guys said "are you calling us blokes amateurs?" in a very upset tone.
The Otis guy replied "Yeah, what else do you call people who can afford to play fast an loose with systems that aren't mission critical*** and don't bring everything else to a halt when they fail?"
*** First time I ever heard that phrase, kinda why I remember the conversation because I asked afterwards, he worked on the lifts at cape canaveral...
Now that's the thing here, some want power when the next katrina hits, some want power like mr belk, off the grid, and some want power when the grid gets too expensive.
The professional is the one who realises that when you want power, when you need power, and there ain't none, and there ain't none because you cut a corner and saved youself 5 minutes of inconvenience and 5 bucks of consumables two years ago, and everything stops because you have no power, you had a mission critical system that you treated like a standby system, and now you better pray nobody has their life depending on power, because they die and you killed them.
Lister were professional engineers, the CS was made to last and run forever, and even if it did somehow die, that failure mode would be minimal, and easy and fast and cheap to repair, it absolutely would not be a show stopper like a broken crank.
if you play the odds, cost and convenience against reliability, then you are playing a different game.
if you want a listeroid as a hobby say so, nobody has a problem with that.
if you want a listeroid as a standby say so, nobody has a problem with that.
what you don't get to do is act like an amateur and strut around calling yourself a professional.
for example the lister cs lube system, it does not have a failure mode, if there is oil in the engine and then engine is rotating then everything gets lubed, the oil pump can die and it still gets lubed, and it will do 100,000+ hours at full load and 100% duty cycle, and still not be worn out or unserviceable, and even then if it does fail because yau ran it out of oil or used kerosene to lube it with, you can fix it fast and cheap and easy, because you hav eonly worn out things that were designed to be sacrificed.
omit the concrete or other mass to shift the c-o-m and your amateur, it prolly still won't go wrong, but it might, and if it does you are fucked, no easy repair, no cheap repair, no fast repair, pray nobody has a life depending on it.
so you go from an Otis style failure mode to a Briggs and Stratton style failure mode, you make something that was as close to perfect as you get in engineering to something that itself needs a backup in case of emergency, and you did this to save a buck and to prove you were right and the pros who were telling you to do it another way were wrong.
I repeat, I posted a picture to this very forum of a busted crank, and that was a genuine quality Lister crank, no some knock off clone of unknown quality, and it was busted by being run for some time without being bolted to a block.
All of you listeroid guys put together don't have the engine hours my single engine has, where do you get off claiming this lack of data is somehow statistically significant? it demonstrates nothing except the fact that you don't understand chance.
I flip a coin, it is a normal coin, 50/50 chance of heads or tails
I can flip ten heads in a row and ask you to bet one the next show, even those who say they know it can still be 50/50 will want to bet on tails.
I listed three books, go and read at least one of them, you will learn so much, and some of it will even be about fatigue as it applies to your listeroids.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE
(not to be confused with irish roulette, whicb uses a semi automatic)
6 shot revolver, one bullet, two ways of playing, one is spin the drum every time, the other is spin it once only to start the game.
spin every time you could in theory play a million straight turns and walk away with an undischarged gun, you have a 1 in 6 chance every time, works the same way as flipping the coin, because you are in effect re-setting the odds against you to zero every time, there is no cumulative probability.
play the spin once one way
VERY different, and difficult to calculate the odds.
IN THEORY the first turn is still a 1 in 6 chance, in practice the very fact that the odds in this game will drop to unity after an absolute maximum of 5 turns skews the odds against you before you even start, because every turn brings the inevitable closer.
IN Theory the second turn is a 1 in 5 chance, and so on down to a 1 in 1 chance, or certainty, unless you wanna play lotto odds and pray for a misfire
in russian roulette two players take turns.
in listeroid roulette one player takes every turn, and you do not rebuild the motor to factory spec after every revolution, wear and fatigue are cumulative, same as the no spin the drum roulette game.
adding the concrete or other block changes the odd from a no spin the drum game to a spin the drum every turn game, the odds, whatever they are, never shorten no matter how long you play the game.
the listeroid is not a six shot revolver, it is potentially a millions of chambers revolver, nevertheless, not shifting the centre of mass changes the game from spin every turn and reset the odds against you to the ticking clock of spinning once and ever shortening odds.
those of you attempting to quantify this in probability terms need to EASILY be able to give the correct answer to this question.
Fact. A coin has a 1 in 2 chance of landing heads. If it lands ten heads in a row that is a 1 in 1024 chance. If it lands ten heads in a row the chance of the next turn being heads is still 1 in 2.
Fact. A six shot revolver used in spin once only russian roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of discharging the first turn, a 1 in 5 the second turn IF it did not discharge the first turn, and a 1 in 4 chance the third turn IF it did not discharge on the first two turns.
Question. Three turns with no discharge out of six possible turns = a 1 in 2 chance, how do you arrive at 1 in 2 from a 1 in 6 followed by a 1 in 5 followed by a 1 in 4.
Question. The russian roulette odds work on theory, the assumption being that the bullet is in the last or sixth chamber, it might be in the first, or third, in which case the REAL odds of a discharge will be quite different to the THEORETICAL odds of a discharge. DO the math to reconcile the fact that in real life on average every six games will result in a 1 in 1 chance, or certainty of a discharge, on the first turn.
The thing you need to wrap your head around with these probabilities is that the game ending in discharge is absolutely guaranteed if you only spin once, and when the game is over there are no more odds and no more probabilities, you just became a statistic, a fact, past tense.
The concrete block allows you to spin the chamber every turn, the odds never shorten on you, it's like the lottery again, you keep playing, and mostly it is a game where the number never come up.