Lister and gen "frames" or "mounts"

[wagspe208]

Is there any reason I cannot weld up a 2" x 3"  .120 wall (or something similar sized) frame to mount the Lister engine to and mount the gen on a slide on the frame? Is there something I am missing? I have seen threads with 2000# of concrete to bolt the engine to??
A frame, a couple of anchors to the floor and done??
Thanks
Wags

[bschwartz]

Go ahead.  A thin walled frame with a few screws into the floor will be fine.


You don't plan on starting it though do you?  You really want to build this to just sit there and look cool.......

There is a reason you see threads with 2000# blocks of concrete.  Do your reading and choose between a big block of concrete, or resilient mounts, but a lightweight frame will not hold up well to the constant thumping of a really big single over a long period of time.  Think of a Lister as a really slow speed jack hammer.

[wagspe208]

This is why I was asking. Personally I am a metal guy.
Any suggestions?  Do most guys just use J bolts through a billion pounds of concrete, or a frame with bolts on top of concrete?
Thanks
Wags

[Tom]

I used 6-3/4" tie 20" long down bolts to hold mine down to the concrete block. The frame is 4" channel iron and no problems after 1k hours.

[Tijean]

12" ship and car channel on mine with a 3/4" plate deck. I dont like going back and chasing cracks in oily old engine mounts. A few thousand hours most anything will hold together. I have been down in the bottom of old fish boats running 6 71 Detroit diesels for endless hours and the cracks and past attempts to stop the cracking are very obvious. Solid mounted diesel engines crack mounts! Some creative resilient mounting systems can get by with lighter material but then you have problems with all the connections to the engine needing the same freedom to flex. There are a lot of different problems to solve in mounting and it leaves lots of room for argument. Weight, space and ground thump transfer was no concern and I wanted additional height so I went bull strong with a 300 lb base lagged down to the concrete floor with 2" wood bearers between.

If I decide it should be mobile, all it needs is a set of wheels and a tow hitch but in the meantime I dont want my genset dancing around!

[billswan]

This is why I was asking. Personally I am a metal guy.
Any suggestions?  Do most guys just use J bolts through a billion pounds of concrete, or a frame with bolts on top of concrete?
Thanks
Wags

Wags

Seriously many of  these listeroids if not balanced are like jackhammers. Mine was a real jumper until I did a trial and error balance job. The chances that you will get long life out of .120 thick steel is shall we say thin....

I used 10 inch I beams  bolted to 4X6 wood with anchors into the concrete floor and until I refined the balance a second time I had trouble keeping all the anchors tight.
I looked through my pix but none showed the base very well so no pix to put up.

Billswan

[bschwartz]

4" steel I beam welded frame J bolted to a cubic yard of concrete sitting on a rubber cow mat.

http://Http://s828.photobucket.com/albums/zz204/brettschwartz/?action=view&current=IMG_3013.jpg&newest=1

[DRDEATH]

Wags the Japanese and German engineers have proved bigger and heavier is not always better. So if you had a CAD program that could show you stress loads, structure design and quality attachment then you could get by with something smaller that most of us simple folks tend to use. Now remember if anything fails then you base will fail. So if you don't want a 800 # giant jumping around killing everything in site then grab a couple 6" beams, 4 or 5 supports in the middle and bolt it to a bunch of crete and don't worry about the BIG BAD GIANT. It aint going to go anywhere. I have 12' I beams just because I could. DD

[wagspe208]

Balance...
OK, some of the issue seems to be balance, or imbalance. Why don't we just balance the engines. I come from race engine world. Balance is not rocket science. It seem as one of these pieces can be ripped apart in a mater of hours. So.... why not?
Wags

The twins would be much easier to do than singles due to crankshaft design.

[Tijean]

Do a search here on    balance   . It may not be rocket science but it is not a snap either to get optimum balance on either a single or a double. The double has rocking moment issues that make is more complicated rather than easier.  You can find hours of reading here on these particular engines.

[wagspe208]

It should be much easier than anything that has to have balance over an rpm change. IE a race engine has to be in balance over a 3000 to 5000 rpm range. Heck, our stuff has to be in balance at a certain rpm. It will take a little experimentation to get the desired % of rotating/ reciprocating weight, but not a huge amount.
I will search, but are guys using real crankshaft balancers, or just the string and chalk method?
Wags

[listerdiesel]

The issue is not 'just' balancing the engine, there are dynamic forces at work which will eventually damage anything less than solid on an installation.

Our Ruston horizontal diesel has 'balanced' flywheels, but the dynamics of a big single running fairly slowly will bounce the whole thing up and down on 6 tyres (tires) with no trouble:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vlWk3YNZhY

Even with the chassis chocked up on blocks, it still shakes about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEAamOI-2A

As we are using it as a mobile item, it isn't so much of an issue with us, but that whole engine, frame and chassis weighs 2.3 tons.

Peter

[toydiesel01]

I made my frame from a old heavy duty electric pallet jack, welded back together  with lots of supports, cement floor is 2 feet thick, used 1/2 inch by 20 j hooks in cement with 1 inch rubber matt- preloaded rubber mat.  It was still vibrating-shaking the shed and the house and all the ground, broke 1 of the j hooks.  I called a special commercial/industrial vibration isolation company, by the rotating speed and the weight of the machine and frame,they could figure out what isolation mount I needed, that was not to expensive.
I purchased the isolation mounts and installed them under my frame to the cement floor. Now with 200 hrs and no problems, no shaking and no vibration.
You need to remember you have a piston the size of a coffey can moving up and down, even if the other parts are ballenanced,this piston is always trying to make the engin jump.

Thin metal will only give you a lot of headache's,  make it very rugged from the start.

[billswan]

Balance...
OK, some of the issue seems to be balance, or imbalance. Why don't we just balance the engines. I come from race engine world. Balance is not rocket science. It seem as one of these pieces can be ripped apart in a mater of hours. So.... why not?
Wags

The twins would be much easier to do than singles due to crankshaft design.

Wags

Since you have access to an engine balancer by all means balance it. It is just that not all of us out here in the cheap seats have the access or the money to do it. We have to resort to by guess and by gosh methods.

But at one time many years ago I had a single cylinder engine on a mini bike that was being over speeded and I asked a local race engine builder who was very knowledgeable on the subject of balance tell me that singles just do not balance out well and his advise was let it viberate. Gets back to what you mentioned about "% of rotating/ reciprocating weight" and widely varying rpm's.

But I will also agree with you in that at one set speed it should be possible to get a roid to run very calm if you are willing to spend enough time and money on it.

There is a fellow out west some where that balances these large roids may be you can become the one to go to in the mid America area for a professional balance job.

Billswan

[ronmar]

You also have the massive torque pulse of a large displacement slow speed single to contend with.  you can balance them pretty well with chalk, and on rollers with a dial gauge, but unless you get creative with the mount design, large mass is really your friend to contend with the torque.  The base frame also needs to be stiff enough to resist flexing at every combustion cycle...

Good luck with yours.