Lister Engine Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: GuyFawkes on September 21, 2006, 11:29:26 AM
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Kyrdawg, I'm getting notifications from my email server that you are sending (windows) emails with attachments that are getting binned, if you need to say something to me do it in plain text.
Mounting your lister(oid) the point of the block of concrete is to shift the centre of mass of the engine / block system outside the engine crankcase, the engine crankcase is designed in that shape with that taper to assist in transmission of these forces outside the block, you can hold any differing opinion you like about this, and flexible mounts, but you are wrong, period, do (and show) the math if you are so convinced you are right.
Lister longevity / maintenance cannot be inferred from oil change intervals, a degree in physics and working with Cat diesels doesn't qualify you to speculate crap about how listers work, especially when you cheerfully ignore your degree in physics and conveniently exclude the vectors of the reciprocating and rotating internal components from your analysis and resort to idle speculation that serves no purpose except to support the plan you intend to go ahead with anyway, because it is cheaper and faster than any other method.
External vibration as experienced by a human standing next to rotating machinery is precisely useless and of no relevance whatsoever to internal loading experienced by the system, two simple shafts contra-rotating with equal eccentric weights will show zero external vibration, but be subject to vast internal stresses.
I surgical toy / vibrator motor is essentially a DC motor with an eccentric weight, if you think dangling it on a wire so it can move will make it last longer than clamping it to a vice you need to go back to school and learn some fundamentals.
Claiming something is right 99 different ways does not make it right, it just makes you stupid because it demonstrates 99 times that you refuse to see what it there and prefer to work under an illusion.
The more I step back from this site, the less I am inclined to even watch it now and again, because all I see is more and more of the same old shit, it costs nobody anything to read or post so everyone has zero penalty for shitting on their own doorstep. Kyrdawg and those with no Listers, and those with no years spent working with mechanical systems of all sorts day in and day out, need to be excluded or confined to a rubber room.
F=ma
Force = mass x acceleration
You can calculate mass and you can measure acceleration or force, two out of three gets you the third, there is PRECISELY ZERO THEORY in this, these are LAWS of physics, not THEORIES, acceleration due to gravity at sea leval is always 9.81 metres per second, it doesn't change for a lister or because big oil has a cartel or because your unity free energy device plans says it can.
When you can routinely supress the charge on the proton or unbind the weak and strong nuclear forces you may be able to mess with this stuff, until then, you are talking bullshit.
How do I know you can't do any of these things? You are not a bajillionaire and you have time away from running the planet to post here, because if any of your theories were provable as factual in a laboratory enviornment you would be a God and all the venture capitalists, bankers, industrialists and military types on the planet would be beating a path to your door.
Arches, eiffel tower, dams, all sorts of structures have curves, not to look pretty, but to shift load from one place to another, your listeroid has them too in the shape of the crank case (and the shape of the rockers, but that was another thread eh) and it is that shape for a reason.
Shifting the centre of mass outside the crankcase shifts the vectors of vibration outside the radius of the crankshaft, this is not speculation, it is fact.
If you do not agree or understand it is YOU who are taking the non-default position and claiming the sun revolves around the earth, and so it is YOU who must PROVE your theory, not those of us who adhere to engineering fact.
Magnets on car fuel lines are designed to exploit people like you, by definition, stupid gullible people, who can be very easily persuaded to part with their hard cash for some snake oil bullshit. You are the easiest people in the world to con, because you are all eager participants in your own self delusions.
If I point a gun at your heads and offer you US$10,000 or the bullet to the brain in a series of pass / fail tests, you would all take the chance on proving the sun rises in the easy, gravity works on all masses and densities, conservation of energy and so on, none of you would take the bait on elastic mounts.
This is what always pissed me off, long before the net, people who you know are wrong and who you know don't actually believe they are right to any great extent (they believe it until they are made to prove it, at which point they do not abandon their beliefs, but round upon the person who made them prove it) but still think they have a right to an opinion that should weigh as much as your facts.
You wanna believe evolution is shit and god made the world in 7 days, go right ahead, you want to spend my tax dollars teaching that and you'll be meeting your alleged maker soon enough.
Each one of you bullshit merchants drives away a half a dozen potentially interested people from buying a Lister and experimentting, and you confuse the shit out of 80% of those that remain with your crap. Maybe that is your purpose, maybe you can't stand to see people get on with stuff and achieve things, or maybe you're desperate to be included in some sort of self delusion that your are somehow participating at the bleeding edge and empowering yourselves.
You aren't, you are a pain in the fucking ass, but here is a home truth for you.
I don't just like people like you, I love you, because if any of you were half as good as you think you were, I would have had to find something entirely different to do for a (very good) living,
Status Quo.
My credentials are not in question, because I am not the one claiming that generations of engineers have got it wrong. I am not the one who has to show all my commercially successful engine designs, because I am not claiming that Lister got it wrong. I don't have to show you around jobs I have done and rotating equipment installations, because I am not the one claiming the de-facto standards are wrong.
You lot claim you know better, you come out with the same old tired bullshit, like "well technology has moved on since then" which is a straw man, because the modulus of elasticity of air hasn't changed, nor have the laws of gravity, momemtum, etc etc etc.
Kyrdawg and others, I really wish you would one day actually go out in the real world and put your wallet where your mouth is and buy a listeroid, modify it exactly as you have been telling everyone else to do, then stand next to it, as close as possible... it is only a question of time.
I really am out of here, so long and thanks for all the fish.
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Guy, you can lead a horse to water......
I hope you keep your website up.
Regards,
Emil
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Guy,
Awesome fuckin post dude! ;)
Peace&Love, Darren
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Darren,
STOP- GO AWAY- STOP- SPARE US THE SELF GLOSS- STOP- HAVE A RELEVANT TAKE- STOP- LET US KNOW WHEN YOU ACTUALLY OWN A LISTER(OID)- STOP- FAILING THAT LET US ALL KNOW IF YOU EVER SEE ONE- STOP- GET TO WORK- STOP!- EOM
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Damn, seems like everytime i take off for a couple of days, all the fun starts all over again.... and i miss it.
Guy: (if you are still in attendance :) )
"Mounting your lister(oid) the point of the block of concrete is to shift the centre of mass of the engine / block system outside the engine crankcase, the engine crankcase is designed in that shape with that taper to assist in transmission of these forces outside the block, you can hold any differing opinion you like about this, and flexible mounts, but you are wrong, period, do (and show) the math if you are so convinced you are right."
1. yes bolting your engine to any large mass, rigidly will move the center of mass as you say, but...
the som's are bolted to a cast iron base of far less mass than a ton of concrete, they seem to work pretty smoothly, do they not? is it likely because of a better quality of dynamic balance vs. the typical listeroid?
2. the shape of the crankcase casting has more to do with transmission of torque or anti torque to the bolts and with the
needed draft angles to remove the core pattern from the molds than to some higher math transmission of vibrations, in my opinion.
the crankcase design is not a radical departure from that which was common for engines of the lister's original class.
i find it hard to believe all of the varied manufactures had the capability to do finite analysis and come up with a design to transmit vibration to the base. am i wrong? if so how?
3. i would agree that trying to rubber mount the engine proper is an excersize in futility, because of the some basic physic's or geometry... the base is too damn narrow and the torque is simply too high, coupled with a high centerline of the crankshaft.
where i part company on this topic is where and how rubber mounts are to be implimented. forget rubber mounting the engine to the frame, bed or whatever.
one has to build up in some manner a proper base such as the cast unit of the SOM's, this effectively moves the torque action away from the base of the engine and reduces the torque against the rubber mounts.
a steel base could be made with a torque box design that would be very rigid, and having done so be rubber mounted to the floor.
4. all of this is a mute point if the engine in question is poorly balanced, if it has been properly balanced as i am sure the original product was i see no need for 1 ton of concrete.
5. 1 ton of concrete with a poorly balanced listeroid bolted in place, while apparently running just fine, and relatively smoothly is still going to kill itself. my reasoning...
all of the torque, vibration from reciprocating mass, etc, is transmitted thru the main brgs via the crankshaft, to the case, and from there to the 1 ton concrete block (using the example) which is the weakest link? the crank and the brgs (assuming the mount bolts don't fail first) followed by the crankcase casting, then by the 1 ton block itself. further.....
it stands to reason that a rubber mounted poorly balanced engine will last longer than one bolted to a huge block of concrete, reasoning i would submit is ...
take a large hammer a soft piece of metal (babbit if you like) ..
then place it on a rubber mat, and beat on it with the hammer, conversely ..
place the soft metal on a anvil (our 1 ton block of concrete) and pound on it...
i think you will find that the metal will yield far faster when subjected to forces when achored between to rather large masses,
where am i flawed in this one? please explain.
"Shifting the centre of mass outside the crankcase shifts the vectors of vibration outside the radius of the crankshaft, this is not speculation, it is fact."
i would agree with this statement only in sofar as the SOM is concerned, here the case may be made that the fine engineers at lister did all the finite analysis to determine precisely how to redirect forces from the engine crankcases into the cast base frame.
where i am unclear on is how any engineer can with any sense of certainty prove out the theory of transmission of center of mass away from the crankcase and into the 1 ton block.... reasoning you might ask...
there is no specific dimension of the 1 ton block, what i mean by specific is exact measurements, consistancy/size/mix of the concrete mix, rebar placement and sizes, specific placement of the engine etc etc.
should the engineers have spec'd out the block to the nth degree, any deviation from those spec's could and would alter the perfomance parameters of the 1 ton block for purposes of moving the center of mass, just as a bell made up of slightly differing metallurgy, dimensions etc will ring a different note even if they weigh the same. and....
the sweet spot would only work for a finely balanced engine running at one specific rpm, and
this 1 ton block would have to be sitting on an engineered bedding, or... the whole thing goes either side of center, just as a note on a keyboard goes from flat thru the note to sharp.
where am i wrong here, please enlighten me?
"My credentials are not in question"
no sir they are not i assure you, but i do wish to learn where i can, so i ask questions..
"because I am not the one claiming that generations of engineers have got it wrong"
i don't think for a moment that they got it wrong, but engineers make comprimises, happens everyday and will continue
to be the norm until the perfect machine is developed, which by the way will never happen.
so where am i going with this?
1. forget thinking that if you have a jackrabbit engine that is so poorly balanced that bolting it to a 1 ton block of anything is going to fix it. yes it will make it tolerable for a time, maybe a very long time. likely tho' it will end up with a much shorter lifespan.
2. if you have a well balanced engine, go ahead a bolt it to whatever you like, if it is secure it will run a very long life based on this parameter only.
3. if you have a jumper, do whatever is within your budget and power to correct the underlieing issues, in other words balance it!
4. if you feel you need the use of rubber isolators then at least do as Guy suggests, do the math!, follow proper engineering
build a rigid steel frame of torque box design. spread the mounts as wide as possible and use high density mounting materials, forget the soft automotive mounts that are meant for complete vibration and noise transmission.
comeon Guy, i miss the dialog
bob g
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Bob, WOW ;)
Peace&Love :D, Darren
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WOW....all!........I do have an Listeroid...it was a "jackrabbit"....Kangaroo is more like it! Balanced it and now it is a Kitty cat....just purrs....It is mounted on that stuff called rubber....other than tires they didn't use it for much else when the Lister was desgined....A ton of concrete would be a waste under it....Oh and if we listened to all of the law of this and that...lets see the some law said it was imposible to exceed 200mph in the 1/4 mile....something to do with acceleration....speed of sound...they didn't know what was gonna happen...If some Spaniard really believed the world was flat I wouldn't be here.....hell they didn't even know what the 1st atomic bomb was gonna do....I'll bet half of the listers were never mounted to there exact specification.....Has anyone heard of any grenade stories?....really!....not theory or laws but facts of destruction due to mounting....I would love to hear it!
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Damn, seems like everytime i take off for a couple of days, all the fun starts all over again.... and i miss it.
Guy: (if you are still in attendance :) )
"Mounting your lister(oid) the point of the block of concrete is to shift the centre of mass of the engine / block system outside the engine crankcase, the engine crankcase is designed in that shape with that taper to assist in transmission of these forces outside the block, you can hold any differing opinion you like about this, and flexible mounts, but you are wrong, period, do (and show) the math if you are so convinced you are right."
1. yes bolting your engine to any large mass, rigidly will move the center of mass as you say, but...
the som's are bolted to a cast iron base of far less mass than a ton of concrete, they seem to work pretty smoothly, do they not? is it likely because of a better quality of dynamic balance vs. the typical listeroid?
a/ Yes, genuine CS 6/1 was a pretty well balanced and behaved engine, at tickover... at full torque they will thump.
b/ The cast iron base serves a lot of purposes, it aligns everything for starters, listers used different bases for different applications, eg pump driving etc.
2. the shape of the crankcase casting has more to do with transmission of torque or anti torque to the bolts and with the
needed draft angles to remove the core pattern from the molds than to some higher math transmission of vibrations, in my opinion.
the crankcase design is not a radical departure from that which was common for engines of the lister's original class.
i find it hard to believe all of the varied manufactures had the capability to do finite analysis and come up with a design to transmit vibration to the base. am i wrong? if so how?
a/ one side of torque goes against the cylinder walls, the other side turns the crank, you get a mainly shearing force on the crankcase base bolts, torque tends to make the crankcase rotate around the crankshaft, there is an excess of metal for the torque generated.
b/ you are right about moulds, but look at the barrel, it too takes 100% of the torque, but it shows almost no taper, the crankcase taper is vastly excessive if the sole purpose was mould / plug removal.
c/ look at the curve in question, it's basically a french curve derived design, as everything was before CAD, the interesting thing is you can draw leading edges of concorde supersonic wings and rolls royce turbine blades with french curves, just because these things were done before CAD, or with nothing more complex than pythagoras or euclid doesn't mean that they can be automatically improved upon today. Note the spiral spokes in early cast flywheels, there was zero cosmetic / aesthetic purpose to spiral spokes, it was NOT done to look nice.
d/ the lister factory and a iron foundry casting crank cases for diesel engines did not just spring up out of no-where (this is why I get so angry today at everything we have thrown away) but were based upon a couple of hundred years of casting iron for gas engines, for steam engines, and so on, when the first diesel block was designed and cast they built upon generations of foundry experience that was already there, the fact that the CS runs on diesel doesn't change the vibes and harmonics, power it on compressed air or steam and they will still be there, so fatigue induced losses were old hat and well understood.
e/ even in the days of pony & trap, listers was less than a day from what was the greatest steam locomotive & railway manufacturing centre in the world, and when aviation came about that was on their doorstep too, so there were VAST amounts of generations deep experience right on their doorstep from which the entire labour pool would be drawn, steam locomotive pisons bear many similarities to a CS crankcase.
f/ everything built back then stood on the shoulders of some other design, yanks into motorcycles will get this with harley, pan / knuck / shovel, try and put a v-rod barrel on a pan... so no brand new engine designs were born, everything evolved, the CS evolved out of a petrol engine. Nobody talks about all the tens of thousands of failures along the way, but they were incorporated into incremental design changes year by year.
3. i would agree that trying to rubber mount the engine proper is an excersize in futility, because of the some basic physic's or geometry... the base is too damn narrow and the torque is simply too high, coupled with a high centerline of the crankshaft.
where i part company on this topic is where and how rubber mounts are to be implimented. forget rubber mounting the engine to the frame, bed or whatever.
one has to build up in some manner a proper base such as the cast unit of the SOM's, this effectively moves the torque action away from the base of the engine and reduces the torque against the rubber mounts.
a steel base could be made with a torque box design that would be very rigid, and having done so be rubber mounted to the floor.
I agree with you 100%, were our considerations ONLY that of torque.
lbs of engine per bhp or per ft/lb torque tells you stationary engines are a world away from anything else you ever worked on, doesn't matter if the motive power is steam, or natural gas, or diesel, everything is MASSIVELY built, BUT, flywheel weight as a proportion of total engine weight is not so high, take the traction Listers like the JP series and the flywheels are far more massive.
Lister did do CS engines to be used as traction engines, they were rare (becuase the sump meant you couldn't incline the engine or subject it to any significant acceleration) and those engine had massive flywheels that dwarfed the 2 x 300 lb start-o-matic wheels.... I saw one in the middle east (where there was no wood for fuel) mounted into a steam shovel, it had a single massive flywheel that must have easily weighed 3/4 of a ton, with PTO on the other end of the crank
4. all of this is a mute point if the engine in question is poorly balanced, if it has been properly balanced as i am sure the original product was i see no need for 1 ton of concrete.
fatigue is a funny thing, you can try and model it in a computer, but you are only modelling it, and if your model doesn't match the results you have to go back and adjust your model, back in the day you went back and adjusted the design.... fatigue doesn't show up (unless you have the design badly wrong) in 5 or 10 thousand hours, it shows up in 20, or 30, or 50 thousand hours, and, bear in mind where these things were sold, when it showed up your VERY expensive (cost as much as a house) product stopped working and stayed that way for perhaps weeks while waiting for a spare part to be shipped out.
The de havilland comet aeroplane is an interesting example of fatigue. (also of the evolutionary school of design that was all there was back then)
Engineering is relatively easy, simple and straightforwards if you can simply omit fatigue and assume that all materials used have unchanging properties throughout their lives.
5. 1 ton of concrete with a poorly balanced listeroid bolted in place, while apparently running just fine, and relatively smoothly is still going to kill itself. my reasoning...
I agree 100%, a ton of concrete will not compensate for an unbalanced and poorly assembled engine, it will mask it as will loading a pick up truck with imbalanced wheels, no more.
all of the torque, vibration from reciprocating mass, etc, is transmitted thru the main brgs via the crankshaft, to the case, and from there to the 1 ton concrete block (using the example) which is the weakest link? the crank and the brgs (assuming the mount bolts don't fail first) followed by the crankcase casting, then by the 1 ton block itself. further.....
omit the concrete block and it is (in 99% of cases) usually the crankshaft itself that fails at a fillet, and the flipside is if you have a broken crank then 99% of the time you need to look at a fatigue failure induced by (in a stationary engine or machine of any kind) improper mounting.
The crank, bearings, block etc are all designed to handle the torque with ease, the torque is essentially irellevant, vibes from reciprocating masses (mixture of reciprocating and rotating really) in a presumably well assembled engine are the issue here, if they are allowed to work upon the components subject to fatigue then fatigue will happen.
The weakest thing is the crankshaft (cross sectional area compared to the block etc) because it not only is relatively small x section, but unlike say the con rod it is subject to fatigue forces from ALL angles of radius, whereas conron is basically subject to compression and tension only, stay well within tensile / shear / hooke limits and the conrod will last forever.
The only way to cure this is to move these forces away from the crankshaft so they can no longer fatigue it. It is impractical to alter the forced themselves, eg unobtanium pistons with zero mass and untimate strength etc, so the only other thing that you can alter in any vector equation is shifting the centre of mass.
Shedding weight and therefore strength is not an option, so you have to add weight, and you have to add it as an inert block, not a slab that can set up its own sympathetic harmonics.
Ask Mr Belk why nobody ever designed a rifle or handgun where the barrel and therefore recoil was not a straight line to the body, why is it always offset from the grip?
Answer is there are guns made that way, and they are all designed to be mounted to something else, something solid.
Human held guns are designed so the recoil will rotate the weapon, and the recoil itself is angled, bones (when you fall) only break when you load then endwise or snap them in the middle, angle them slightly and they transmit the energy somehwhere else, maybo to a collar bone which will break. And nobody used finite element modelling when designing the original pistol and rifle grips...
Flying buttresses on walls (which have stood for 1000 years) do nothing else except transmit forces along a different path, outside the wall itself.
Mr Belk tells of breaking massive concrete bridge sections by mounting an engine on them and simply running it, WHERE DID THIS ENERGY COME FROM to fatigue and fracture this concrete if it is not being transmitted from inside the engine exactly as I have been saying?
it stands to reason that a rubber mounted poorly balanced engine will last longer than one bolted to a huge block of concrete, reasoning i would submit is ...
it stands to reason that if you are doing 30 mph on a motorcycle in a straight line and you wish to turn left you turn the bars and front wheel to face left, try it and you will turn to the right.
it may be impractical to ask you to buy two identical engines and test this, it is not impractical to suggest to you that stationary equipment (listers alone made nearly half a million d engines) manufacturers have already done this test, literally millions of times over, and the answer has always been the same.
if you have time and a couple of thousand bucks to burn buy 20 brand new briggs & stratton engines, bolt the same eccentric to each, rubber mount half of them, and solid mount the other half, run them all to destruction and come back and tell us that literally millions of stationary engines and equipment installers were correct on the one hand, and a few people on a forum who did things because it stood to reason were wrong on the other hand.
there are a couple of people here into electronics, you can buy and assemble for maybe a couple of hundred dollars quite sensetive 3 axis acceleromers, bolt them to your listeroid and start doing data capture, then raise it off the block and insert rubber mounts or flexible mounts of any kind and repeat.
here is a clue, stationary equipment manufacturers are hip to this "new technology" so now they will actually quote acceptable vibration and shock in terms of Gravities and Milliseconds, even for stuff as cheap as computer hard disk drives, but also for an expensive as a new house, as Listers were, stationary engines and equipment.
Guess what, none of them will agree with forum members, all of them will go with the right way.
EVer seen rubber mounted lathes or press brakes?
take a large hammer a soft piece of metal (babbit if you like) ..
then place it on a rubber mat, and beat on it with the hammer, conversely ..
place the soft metal on a anvil (our 1 ton block of concrete) and pound on it...
why? it will tell you nothing about fatigue...
here is an opposite example that will also tell you nothing about fatigue.
get two guys to hold up a sheet of glass, throw a chair at it and watch it smash. repeat with a second sheet.
now mount two identical sheets of glass in a double glazing frame and fit to a house, throw the same chair at it and stand back and watch in amazement as the chair bounces back at you leaving the glass unbroken.
i think you will find that the metal will yield far faster when subjected to forces when achored between to rather large masses,
hammer, anvil, work, how come the fixed anvil remains unchanged but the flexibly mounted in the blacksmiths tong work piece gets deformed?
where am i flawed in this one? please explain.
fatigue.
read about liqufaction of apparently solid clay, fatigue.
fatigue is not like other stresses or forces.
fatigue makes a mockery or tensile, shear, compressive and other ratings of any material you care to shake a stick at.
"Shifting the centre of mass outside the crankcase shifts the vectors of vibration outside the radius of the crankshaft, this is not speculation, it is fact."
i would agree with this statement only in sofar as the SOM is concerned, here the case may be made that the fine engineers at lister did all the finite analysis to determine precisely how to redirect forces from the engine crankcases into the cast base frame.
where i am unclear on is how any engineer can with any sense of certainty prove out the theory of transmission of center of mass away from the crankcase and into the 1 ton block.... reasoning you might ask...
it is a fairly simple calculation, but it is based on the pre-supposition that you already have the knowledge and theory in place, I can sit down and do the diagrams and math if you like, but it won't help unless you already understand all the tools being used, which by definition if you did have the actual calculation itself would be self evident.
why can I work and break a piece of fencing wire that in other usage can take enough load to literally rip my arms from my body?
fatigue.
until the cracks appear, the metal is on everything except the electron microscopy level quite unchanged.
when the cracks appear it is game over in an eyeblink.
remember the "liberty ships"
read these three books
Metal Fatigue: Theory and Design. ed. A.F. Madayag, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969.
Materials Science and Engineering, An Introduction. 3rd Edition, William D. Callister, Jr., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994.
Mechanical Behavior of Materials Laboratory. N.E. Dowling and R.A. Simonds, University Printing Service, 1995.
there is no specific dimension of the 1 ton block, what i mean by specific is exact measurements, consistancy/size/mix of the concrete mix, rebar placement and sizes, specific placement of the engine etc etc.
Lister parameters were quite specific, it's that old rule of thumb again, average (lot of space inside a crankcase) engine mean density and average concrete density don't vary that much.
should the engineers have spec'd out the block to the nth degree, any deviation from those spec's could and would alter the perfomance parameters of the 1 ton block for purposes of moving the center of mass, just as a bell made up of slightly differing metallurgy, dimensions etc will ring a different note even if they weigh the same. and....
"meaningful accuracy", Lister specified the block to within an inch in each dimension, go bigger in any dimension if you like.
the sweet spot would only work for a finely balanced engine running at one specific rpm, and
the "sweet spot" is focus the fatigue ANYWHERE outside the block / crank radius, we don't care where, as long as it is outside, in the same way that an abdomen hit from a high velocity 50 cal is no less fatal than a head shot, you want that impact momentum anywhere except inside the body / engine.
this 1 ton block would have to be sitting on an engineered bedding, or... the whole thing goes either side of center, just as a note on a keyboard goes from flat thru the note to sharp.
no, it is not precision, once someone shows you how to make a wooden template to build an arch, and what curve to use, anyone can built an arch and remove the wood and it will stay standing, provided the foundations at each end are good.
that is why nobody "Got" the arch for centuries, they couldn't percieve the idea of the force being transmitted to each side and into the foundation.
where am i wrong here, please enlighten me?
"My credentials are not in question"
no sir they are not i assure you, but i do wish to learn where i can, so i ask questions..
"because I am not the one claiming that generations of engineers have got it wrong"
i don't think for a moment that they got it wrong, but engineers make comprimises, happens everyday and will continue
to be the norm until the perfect machine is developed, which by the way will never happen.
so where am i going with this?
1. forget thinking that if you have a jackrabbit engine that is so poorly balanced that bolting it to a 1 ton block of anything is going to fix it. yes it will make it tolerable for a time, maybe a very long time. likely tho' it will end up with a much shorter lifespan.
2 ton (load capacity) pickup truck, 4 very badly balanced wheels, infinte length road to be driven at a steady 50 mph, which will wreck wheel bearings first, the empty truck or the one carrying 2 ton?
2. if you have a well balanced engine, go ahead a bolt it to whatever you like, if it is secure it will run a very long life based on this parameter only.
yes, excepting fatigue.
fatigue MATTERS when you have an engine designed to do 100,000 hours AND STILL NOT BE ANYWHERE NEAR THE END OF ITS SERVICE LIFE.
3. if you have a jumper, do whatever is within your budget and power to correct the underlieing issues, in other words balance it!
yup
and if you want it to last decades tie it solid to a ton of crete, same as you do with your lathe etc.
4. if you feel you need the use of rubber isolators then at least do as Guy suggests, do the math!, follow proper engineering
build a rigid steel frame of torque box design. spread the mounts as wide as possible and use high density mounting materials, forget the soft automotive mounts that are meant for complete vibration and noise transmission.
not exactly, if you still want elastic mounts then bolt the engine solid to the ton of crete and then rubber mount the entire 2 ton shebang, plenty of industrial examples of this practice too.
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GOOD thread. It will take a while for it to all sink in. It also highlights the need to seperate the BS from REAL engineers.
My thanks to both of you, Mobile_Bob and GuyFawkes
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i will step back and tip my hat to Guy as the one with the sheepskin, i am not a trained engineer, but i have a keen sense of observation and an avid appetite for all i can read on the subject.
and yes when pressed to do so, i can do the math :)
Guy:
thank you for the responce, it is always educational, often fascinating, and usually fairly easy to follow.
i read your reply earlier this morning and have given it due consideration and careful thought, i likely will follow with a few more
questions. i do have one tho' to start with, (first an observation, followed by a question).
it would appear that your main concern is that of the weak point being the crankshaft breaking thru the journal fillet area out the cheek, do to unrestrained (or rather not moving it thru to the concrete base) vibration and fatigue.
it has been my experience over the years usually cranks break from a few causes.
a. flaw's in the forging or casting
b. incorrect fillet implimentation
c. harmonic faults caused by a failed damper
d. a sharp and sudden shock load either by loading the shaft or dropping the unit.
to my knowledge the lister/oids are not really heavy consumers of crankshafts, in that there are very few reports of failures.
Granted most of the listeroids have not run in excess of 10k hours so there may very well be more as the hours pile up.
usually what i see failing in all sorts of machinery are brg failures do to vibration, most especially on heavily restrained pieces of equipment, and ...
ancillary pieces on those pieces of equipment that are not heavily restrained, ie. brackets, housings, mounts etc.
so the question is,
are you adament in your position that a well balanced machine (engine) will not last as long unless it is rigidly mounted as one that also been well balanced and properly mounted with some form of resilient mount (ie. rubber)?
i would tend to agree on your position that just lag bolting a lister/oid to a couple of railroad ties is likely not a good idea, but would you fault my position that if one was to construct a well made (rigid) steel structure incorporting a "torque box" design would not fair as well as being bolted to a ton of concrete?
i will follow with a few more comments, questions, and observations in the next day or so.
thanks Guy :)
bob g
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Well.
Now that I'm finished my week of shiftwork, and I'm alert and awake and not-nearly-so-argumentative , I realise that I am also not nearly as eloquent as mobile_bob at getting my thoughts and points across.
I'll say that while you have excellent points Guy_F and you've taken pains to explain it further. Better than rtqii did in my thread, anyway. (Sorry, rtqii, you just didn't have me there. My half-asleep argumentativeness didn't really help, either.)
Saying that , however, I have to say that I agree with Bob. My laughable knowledge of physics and Stationary Engines notwithstanding (haha! let's all laugh along) , there should be another solution that involves flexible mounts. My primary goal is as much vibration isolation as possible, relative longevity second, extreme longevity a distant third. Perhaps it will turn out to be overly complex compared to a traditional mount. Whether it turns into a hybrid block-on-mount setup or a couple of old tyres and a bit of rail is not much of concern for me.
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been giving this whole thing another thunk :)
assuming a well balanced machine (in this case a listeroid), mounting it on a ton of concrete may very well be a proper method for an extended lifecycle of the
engine. the problem remains one of transmission of noise, vibration, thumping or whatever you want to call it to surrounding structures. this may or may not be an issue
with some, part or all users. but it is a concern of mine and i hazard a guess that i am not an unusual instance.
Guy:
more on the stationary engine thing, mounting issues , solid versus rubber mount and all that
you mention trying an experiment with 10 briggs and strattons, mounting some rigid and other non rigid, and comparing lifespans of the engines.
this got me to thinking, and perhaps i am talking apples to oranges here but consider the following
the typical 3.5 hp briggs/stratton horizonal shaft engine as has been in production for the last 50 odd years,
it is unusual to find them bolted down to large blocks of concrete, but not at all unusual finding them bolted down to stamped steel mower decks, edgers, and a plethora of other equipment, hardly rigid mounting. and also in small ~2kwatt gensets where they are either directly rubber mounted to the frames or have rubber cushion feet.
usually they die from neglect, poor maintenance, or bad gas, and in some cases worse fates, none of which can be attributed to the use of resilient mounting.
what i am thinking is there are tradeoffs or comprimises when engineering anything, unless money is no object (think government contracts).
this leads me back to concrete as the end all of mounting the listeroid, i can't get to where i need to be with its use, in that there will be sound, vibration, thumping transmitted to the adjoining structures, this is unacceptable for my use.
further the use of concrete while expedient seems to me a comprimise at best, concrete clearly is not nearly as "dead" as gray cast iron.
if i assume that the goal is to move the center of mass, then some form of mathematical excersize is in order to determine where the center of mass is to be relocated, precisely or at the very least away from the engine, and presumably dead center of the block of concrete. perhaps the lister folks and their calculation and spec's on the ton block of concrete arrived at this point. i would like to see those calculations, or at least some reference to the fine folks at lister having made those calculations.
should i find reference or be directed to those calculations, it would be fairly easy to conceptualize how to arrive at the same destination using a steel frame that is rubber mounted to the floor.
i know this raises your hackles a bit, and i do not mean offense in pressing the issue.
one of your fellow countryman began thinking out of the box back in the 70's in formulae one, mr. Tyrell i believe. with his 4 steer wheel design born in a barn out in the woods of your country if i remember correctly. if anyone knows how to transmit motion, vibration, fatigue points, thumping etc. it is the designers of formula one cars.
to my knowlege while the engines are rigid mounted to the framework (beit tube or mono construction) the engine is still rubber mounted via suspension components and certainly tires.
it stands to reason that perhaps a steel superstructure could be engineered to accomplish the ton of concrete effect while incorporating the rubber isolation mounts many others are seeking.
what do you think?
is there no way to accomplish the rigid mounting of a ton of concrete and rubber mounting without having to actually use the ton of mud?
maybe i am all wet, but i think it can be done. no?
bob g
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Bob
1/ Listers have been making these (and other stationary engines) longer than you or I or anyone else can shake a stick at, they went bust because the world changed, and nobody wanted to buy stuff that was built to last at least a human lifetime any more, plus the world changed and everyone went on grid in the developed world which basically eliminated the domestic and near market. Note well, neither of these are changes in engineering or physical properties.... to a certain extent Listers were a buggy whip factory, they still made some of the best quality and craftsmanship buggy whips in the world, but everyone was driving cars...
2/ All engineering is compromise, designing an object is no less of one just because that object is expensive, you need to understand that Lister CS engines were designed to literally last a lifetime, no corners were cut with this criterion, but even so there is still more than one way to skin a rabbit. The Lister factory was down a small lane in hilly english country, and products were shipped by taking them to the local railway station where they were literally manhandled, so shipping weight and size were an issue, and included in the price was a Lister engineer coming to your premises to comisssion the engine.
3/ That compromise meant it made practical sense to specify that a ton+ of concrete was poured at the installation site, instead of adding a ton of iron to the engine at the factory. There is nothing wrong with this practice, but it means you have to accept the Lister CS was designed from the ground up to be mounted solidly to a very large block of concrete, you can do anything you like, but unless you do as Lister intended you are straying away from their tried, tested and true recipe for a lifetime of reliable service.
4/ You lot are not running Listers, you are running clones where corners have been cut solely to save money, Lister plain bearing mains give a very soft, smooth and cushioned ride to the crank, tapered rollers give an unyeilding hard ride to the crank, I cannot quantify how this changes things without experimentation and a lot of analysis of a Listeroid, which I have never laid eyes or hands on, but clearly it will make a difference. There are other important differences throughout too, and they all add up. The CS design camshaft experiences very light loads, low RPM, mild cam profiles, soft valve springs, and the injection and oil pumps draw negligible torque. It may be that were a proper analysis done we would see that a combination of all these factors, plus the lack of a proper mounting, are directly responsible for all these camshaft idler failures.
5/ I stand by everything I said, get and read the books I listed, this isn't pie in the sky, it is fact.
6/ What is coming through now in your post, and what has been evident in everyone else's post, is their true motivations, your primary concern is not actually doing it properly so your grandkids can have a running engine as Lister intended, you ma say you want that, but in fact 5 or 10k hours will do you, so your primary concern is personal comfort and freedom from vibration and noise.
7/ Put your other hat on and you know you have customers who claim they want the job done properly, but who actually want the job done cheap and fast, this makes sense because we have a forum here full of people who think 1200 bucks is a lot to pay for a diesel engine, nobody here is going to shell out for an Arrow. I rest my case. You have all bought cheap, relatively crap, knock off copies of an original classic, deep down you all know this and know you aren't going to get 100k hours out of your engines, but nobody wants to admit they are a tightwad.
8/ Insofar as the clones have departed from the original Lister design, you still, IMHO can't go wrong with doing everything possible to get as close as you can to the originals, and that means mount them on a ton of crete. Especially with the other clone shortcomings such as roller mains etc.
9/ If you don't want vibes then you shouldn't have bought a 1.5 litre single cylinder diesel, now you've got one on the cheap there is no good compounding the self delusion about the quality of the engine by a further self delusion that rubber mounting it is any kind of quality work, even if it does make for human comfort.... I'm wondering how many of you are embarrased at how your listeroid thumps?
10/ If you want human comfort you should not have bought a Listeroid, which is a clone of a Lister, which was a COMMERCIAL product, not intended for domestic use, costing as it did more than many houses of the day.
11/ Starting from where you are all actually at, my suggestion is the following.
a/ Suck it down and accept you did not 100% understand the nature of what you were buying into, it was a learning process.
b/ Suck it down and accept you bought a cheap copy built down to a price, and do what you can to bring it back to spec.
c/ Suck it down and accept the factory knew best, and bolt it solid to a ton of concrete.
d/ If you still want a vibration free life, there are plenty of low tech ways of doing it, even 2 tons of Listeroid and concrete will float on a small barge in a small pool dug into the ground, keep it centred with springs and you'll have zero vibration, hydraulic mounting is not new, or you can go the other way, pour your ton+ into a steel box, and mount the whole two tons on some sort of suspension of your choice, trailer springs will do it for you.
You can all sit back and do nothing and let Mr Belk continue to be your guinea pig, he now has proper mounts, lets see what his experiences are, not theory, but practice.
cheers
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You have all bought cheap, relatively crap, knock off copies of an original classic, deep down you all know this and know you aren't going to get 100k hours out of your engines, but nobody wants to admit they are a tightwad.
I am a tightwad. Didn't buy the cheapest one but this is a great way to get a big bitch that will run, because I can make it run. For me this will be a fun thing. Don't buy one if you're a whiner.
Insofar as the clones have departed from the original Lister design, you still, IMHO can't go wrong with doing everything possible to get as close as you can to the originals, and that means mount them on a ton of crete. Especially with the other clone shortcomings such as roller mains etc.
Some of the roids are getting closer. I bet there will be plain bearing models available over here eventually. Maybe someone will produce plain bearing carriers for retrofit.
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ok Guy where do i start? :)
me thinks you paint with a broad brush and very thin paint!
please don't try and gloss over my efforts to discuss this topic by stuffing me into a preconceived group of folks that you
find tedious to converse with.
i may have taken an opposing side to the arguement, but i would appreciate learning what i can from the discussion, perhaps others will learn a bit in the process.
the way i figure an arguement (discussion not fistfight) is, it is made up of components. i am not likely to accept an arguement without first analyzing each of those components. bottom line each component of an arguement has to hold its own, or "wash" so to speak.
before i go any further, i would also like to go on the record and state
a. i am no more a cheap bastard than the next guy, but... just because something costs more is no measure of quality
b. i had no blind spots to the limitations of an indian lister, believe me here, i have enough experience to fully understand what i was about to purchase. i knew up front that the likelyhood of one of these running anywhere near 50k hours much less 100k hours was a longer shot than winning the lottery.
c. i have stated many times before that the things typically are a 95% proposition, in that they should be blueprinted and balancing is certainly a part of blueprining any engine.
d. (now the hard ball) the original listers were a series of comprimises and anyone that takes the position that they are the
next coming of christ is out of their minds. are they vastly better than an indian copy? certainly!
now i fully realize i have probably pissed you off with (d) above, if so i am partially sorry :)
now back to the subject.
"1/ Listers have been making these (and other stationary engines) longer than you or I or anyone else can shake a stick at, they went bust because the world changed, and nobody wanted to buy stuff that was built to last at least a human lifetime any more, plus the world changed and everyone went on grid in the developed world which basically eliminated the domestic and near market. Note well, neither of these are changes in engineering or physical properties.... to a certain extent Listers were a buggy whip factory, they still made some of the best quality and craftsmanship buggy whips in the world, but everyone was driving cars..."
this is a fair statement and i would agree
"2/ All engineering is compromise, designing an object is no less of one just because that object is expensive, you need to understand that Lister CS engines were designed to literally last a lifetime, no corners were cut with this criterion, but even so there is still more than one way to skin a rabbit. The Lister factory was down a small lane in hilly english country, and products were shipped by taking them to the local railway station where they were literally manhandled, so shipping weight and size were an issue, and included in the price was a Lister engineer coming to your premises to comisssion the engine."
i would agree to most of this statement, with the exception of... "no corners were cut with this criterion"
corners may not have been cut, but there was certainly an evolution in the engine, most particularly big end oiling.
"3/ That compromise meant it made practical sense to specify that a ton+ of concrete was poured at the installation site, instead of adding a ton of iron to the engine at the factory. There is nothing wrong with this practice, but it means you have to accept the Lister CS was designed from the ground up to be mounted solidly to a very large block of concrete, you can do anything you like, but unless you do as Lister intended you are straying away from their tried, tested and true recipe for a lifetime of reliable service"
i have no reason to fault this statement, seems reasonable that it was far easier, more expedient, chearper, and predictable using the one ton block of concrete. but....
this does not negate my arguement re: the design, fabrication and implimentation of a steel superstructure with "rubber" mounts. So far you have made the assersion that it is the wrong thing to do, without supporting your position. perhaps you could direct me to some documentation that lister in its wisdom made recommedations against this approach, based on their research and testing.
"4/ You lot are not running Listers, you are running clones where corners have been cut solely to save money, Lister plain bearing mains give a very soft, smooth and cushioned ride to the crank, tapered rollers give an unyeilding hard ride to the crank, I cannot quantify how this changes things without experimentation and a lot of analysis of a Listeroid, which I have never laid eyes or hands on, but clearly it will make a difference. There are other important differences throughout too, and they all add up. The CS design camshaft experiences very light loads, low RPM, mild cam profiles, soft valve springs, and the injection and oil pumps draw negligible torque. It may be that were a proper analysis done we would see that a combination of all these factors, plus the lack of a proper mounting, are directly responsible for all these camshaft idler failures."
no we are not working with listers, but copies i agree.. we can all speculate on the rest, but i would suspect it has more to do with quality control of the metallurgy more than any other factors.
"5/ I stand by everything I said, get and read the books I listed, this isn't pie in the sky, it is fact."
i have no doubt these are excellent books on the various subjects covered, but do they source lister development in particular? also....
it would seem your contention is that the clone engines are having serious failures such as broken crankshafts etc., to date i am unaware that they have serious failures and flaws. further...
without evidence of a sufficient number of failures attributed to vibration i see no reason to spend alot of time researching topics such as those covered in your suggesting reading list. what we are talking about here is the mitigation of the transfer of these vibrations to other structures. to summarize
if i have a 1500 dollar listeroid, running on a one ton block, which would i rather sacrifice (using the resilient mounting method)? possible engine longevity (which has not been proven to be shortened by the use of properly designed rubber mounting) or damage due to cracking of my use of stucco in the surrounding structures, namely my home... really its not a hard one to decide for me,,, i would gladly kill an original lister with zero hours fresh out of the crate at 10k hours than have issues with the house.
all of this assumes that your assertion that resilient mounting will shorten the life of a lister/oid, which i will ask again for support of that position, where is the beef?
"5/ I stand by everything I said, get and read the books I listed, this isn't pie in the sky, it is fact."
sorry here, but stating something as fact doesnt make it fact. most especially when used in such a broad sense.
again break the arguement into its components, support each, and then i will accept each component as fact. i don't think
this is being unreasonable... am i?
"6/ What is coming through now in your post, and what has been evident in everyone else's post, is their true motivations, your primary concern is not actually doing it properly so your grandkids can have a running engine as Lister intended, you ma say you want that, but in fact 5 or 10k hours will do you, so your primary concern is personal comfort and freedom from vibration and noise."
yes, you are spot on here, 10k hours will do me just fine,, personal comfort is a minor consideration, freedom from destructive vibration transferred elsewhere is of paramount importance.. but
your assertion that there is only one way of doing it right, seems a bit narrow sighted... i summarily reject the assertion that there is only one way of doing anything "right" .... "right" is a relative term, right for you and right for me can be diametrically opposed,,, then steps in another guy with his "right".... who is wrong? neither you or i, or the other guy. we are all "right" if the end result suits each individual need,,, no?
"/ Put your other hat on and you know you have customers who claim they want the job done properly, but who actually want the job done cheap and fast, this makes sense because we have a forum here full of people who think 1200 bucks is a lot to pay for a diesel engine, nobody here is going to shell out for an Arrow. I rest my case. You have all bought cheap, relatively crap, knock off copies of an original classic, deep down you all know this and know you aren't going to get 100k hours out of your engines, but nobody wants to admit they are a tightwad."
I AM A TIGHTASS,, OKAY I ADMIT IT... :) on this engine,,, but you might be pleasantly surprised at another of my projects, that would give the SOM a hell of a run for its money. further....
this statement doesnt take away from my assertion that i can rubber mount a lister/oid and make it live as long as if bolted to a ton of concrete.
"8/ Insofar as the clones have departed from the original Lister design, you still, IMHO can't go wrong with doing everything possible to get as close as you can to the originals, and that means mount them on a ton of crete. Especially with the other clone shortcomings such as roller mains etc."
agree'd blueprint to lister standards, balance to lister standards,,, and i you like mount it on a ton of concrete, or...
engineer a superstructure with resilient mounting. until i can see some documentation that plainly states resilient mounting properly engineered is going to kill the engine it is not fact!
"9/ If you don't want vibes then you shouldn't have bought a 1.5 litre single cylinder diesel, now you've got one on the cheap there is no good compounding the self delusion about the quality of the engine by a further self delusion that rubber mounting it is any kind of quality work, even if it does make for human comfort.... I'm wondering how many of you are embarrased at how your listeroid thumps?"
don't get me started on this one,,, i currently own approx 27 various diesel engines from 3.5 hp to 28 hp,
also i am not suggesting that one should take a poorly assemble cheap copy, that is horribly out of balance and try to overcome these shortcomings with rubber mounts... what i have said is blueprint/balance it first....
"10/ If you want human comfort you should not have bought a Listeroid, which is a clone of a Lister, which was a COMMERCIAL product, not intended for domestic use, costing as it did more than many houses of the day."
here again cost has nothing to do with quality. and again human comfort was a secondary or less consideration at least for me. still skirts the issue of the discussion.
"11/ Starting from where you are all actually at, my suggestion is the following.
a/ Suck it down and accept you did not 100% understand the nature of what you were buying into, it was a learning process"
i fully understood up front exactly what i was buying, and that was a kit engine, assembled by a bunch of folks in a sand pit, sitting on the floor, built as cheaply as they could do it.
i have worked extensively with very well engineered diesel engines of various manufacture, i know quality when i see it, and conversely i know substandard when i see that as well.
"b/ Suck it down and accept you bought a cheap copy built down to a price, and do what you can to bring it back to spec."
of course,,, yup sure did... and sure as heck will do what is needed to bring it to an acceptable level of spec's
"c/ Suck it down and accept the factory knew best, and bolt it solid to a ton of concrete."
no f*ckin way dude! not until i see supporting doc's from lister showing how they tried and failed with resilient mounting
"d/ If you still want a vibration free life, there are plenty of low tech ways of doing it, even 2 tons of Listeroid and concrete will float on a small barge in a small pool dug into the ground, keep it centred with springs and you'll have zero vibration, hydraulic mounting is not new, or you can go the other way, pour your ton+ into a steel box, and mount the whole two tons on some sort of suspension of your choice, trailer springs will do it for you."
if i follow your logic here, then lister failed to engineer their engine properly, in that they needed the added structural support to make them live. can you document that?
"You can all sit back and do nothing and let Mr Belk continue to be your guinea pig, he now has proper mounts, lets see what his experiences are, not theory, but practice."
fair enough,, what will it prove? we all know that concrete works, what we don't know for a fact is that resilient mounting will kill the engine. further..
10 tons of concrete would not have prevented sand distruction to internal components, i cannot see how a ton of concrete would have extended the life of that engine, he didnt break a crankshaft, he just wore out the brgs. are you going to tell me that had he mounted the engine properly as you say to a ton of concrete it would have run many times longer? seriously?
tag! your it
bob g
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Hey Bob, Easy killer :P
Peace&Love :D, Darren
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Bob's touched upon the issue that I have trouble defining well enough to keep people from foaming at the mouth.
Engineering is a compromise. Lister had a heap of compromises. How to:
- Mount an engine in a million different locations?
- Keep the cost down to a level where they could sell them?
- But keep the design such that it lasted as long as possible?
- Do it without the added advantage that we have now, namely another 80 years of technology?
So they compromised upon a large solid block and said That It Was So. And good for them too, it's an effective catch-all approach that I imagine stopped a lot of customer complaints about so-called stationary engines chasing them about the place. ;)
But, here and now, I see lots of things with similar weights and excitation frequencies, all sitting on some sort of resilient mount. You obviously don't solid mount vibratory screens, but there's an application that works at the extreme opposite of a lister engine and does so reliably for many thousands of hours without cracking exciters, or tearing it's subframe to bits (much). Ditto for pumps , large conveyor drives, industrial dewatering centrifuges and many, many other bits of fixed plant.
So I appreciate the simplicity and good engineering - for it's day - of the lister and it's mount. But I wonder if you talked to an 'modern' engineer for one of those industrial bits of gear and said, "I've got a thing weighing 500kg with a couple of flywheels hanging on a shaft with driven frequencies of 5/10Hz, with a fair amount of torque pulses, on a mezzanine level in a factory. How do I mount it to keep the vibration from being transmitted 3 floors up?"
Would he say, "Mount it on the ground on top of a mostly-buried two-ton concrete block." ?
Or would he say, "You should be able to bolt it on a subframe, mount that with some low natural frequency mounts, maybe with a bit more inertial mass if amplitude's an issue." ?
I obviously don't know the answer, though it makes me wonder.
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i would agree to most of this statement, with the exception of... "no corners were cut with this criterion"
corners may not have been cut, but there was certainly an evolution in the engine, most particularly big end oiling.
lubricant technology evolved dramatically over the lifetime of the CS, the lube system adapted to suit.
i have no reason to fault this statement, seems reasonable that it was far easier, more expedient, chearper, and predictable using the one ton block of concrete. but....
this does not negate my arguement re: the design, fabrication and implimentation of a steel superstructure with "rubber" mounts. So far you have made the assersion that it is the wrong thing to do, without supporting your position. perhaps you could direct me to some documentation that lister in its wisdom made recommedations against this approach, based on their research and testing.
I have answered this point quite specifically numerous times, do the math and the vector analysis, you will see that shifting the centre of mass outside the block makes a dramatic difference.
no we are not working with listers, but copies i agree.. we can all speculate on the rest, but i would suspect it has more to do with quality control of the metallurgy more than any other factors.
possibly so, possibly not, which is the easiest variable to eliminate, all the QA issues or adding a ton of crete?
i have no doubt these are excellent books on the various subjects covered, but do they source lister development in particular? also....
it would seem your contention is that the clone engines are having serious failures such as broken crankshafts etc., to date i am unaware that they have serious failures and flaws. further...
without evidence of a sufficient number of failures attributed to vibration i see no reason to spend alot of time researching topics such as those covered in your suggesting reading list. what we are talking about here is the mitigation of the transfer of these vibrations to other structures. to summarize
Listers are engines subject to the same physics as everything else, the books cover them.
Saying no broken listeroid cranks from the tiny sample you have with negligible hours is rather like saying next years camaro is the best one ever built, you have to wait 20 years to know that.
sorry here, but stating something as fact doesnt make it fact. most especially when used in such a broad sense.
again break the arguement into its components, support each, and then i will accept each component as fact. i don't think
this is being unreasonable... am i?
I am talking about fatigue being an engineering fact, I am talking about thousands of lifetimes of listers in service as data, if you want verifiable peer reviewable analysis done on a point by point basis to prove all these points then someone is going to have to pay.
the default assumption is that tens of millions of lister installed hours and the bulk of engineering knowledge on fatigue is not faulty or erroneous
agree'd blueprint to lister standards, balance to lister standards,,, and i you like mount it on a ton of concrete, or...
engineer a superstructure with resilient mounting. until i can see some documentation that plainly states resilient mounting properly engineered is going to kill the engine it is not fact!
Lister documentation always states the concrete block, and never states resilient mounts, what allows you to discount the single most relevant piece of documentation out there? Do you think Lister just forgot to mention resilient mounts?
"c/ Suck it down and accept the factory knew best, and bolt it solid to a ton of concrete."
no f*ckin way dude! not until i see supporting doc's from lister showing how they tried and failed with resilient mounting
Do you think if they had succeded they would have simply omitted it from every one of millions of instruction manuals printed?
if i follow your logic here, then lister failed to engineer their engine properly, in that they needed the added structural support to make them live. can you document that?
"failed" assumes they tried to do something, and you then move the goalposts about what they may or may not have been aiming for, they built EXACTLY the engine they wanted, and failed at nothing.
The concrete block is an integral part of the design, there is nothing new or exceptional in this, unless you are new to stationary equipment.
"You can all sit back and do nothing and let Mr Belk continue to be your guinea pig, he now has proper mounts, lets see what his experiences are, not theory, but practice."
fair enough,, what will it prove? we all know that concrete works, what we don't know for a fact is that resilient mounting will kill the engine. further..
wait and see if his engine lasts longer in between rebuilds.
it will
10 tons of concrete would not have prevented sand distruction to internal components, i cannot see how a ton of concrete would have extended the life of that engine, he didnt break a crankshaft, he just wore out the brgs. are you going to tell me that had he mounted the engine properly as you say to a ton of concrete it would have run many times longer? seriously?
bob g
seriously, yes, or do you think all those force vectors that were designed to be outside the engine operating inside the radius of the crankshaft somehow improved the lubrication and loading on the crank?
like I said, let mr belk be your guinea pig.
if tens of millions of installed hours from Listers won't convince you, perhaps a few thou from mr belk will.
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Engineering is a compromise. Lister had a heap of compromises. How to:
- Keep the cost down to a level where they could sell them?
Cement is cheaper than a good balance job!
-
"lubricant technology evolved dramatically over the lifetime of the CS, the lube system adapted to suit."
that assumes they got the design right in the first place, which they clearly did not. the top hole oiling and top shell
grooves while working on a 3/1 or maybe a 5/1 hardly followed good engineering design.
"do the math and the vector analysis, you will see that shifting the centre of mass outside the block makes a dramatic difference."
absolutely, could not agree more.... if one shifts the center of mass, from the block theortetically that is a good thing, but...
why do you deny me my contension that i too can move the center of mass from the block into a steel structure and use resilient mounts?
"which is the easiest variable to eliminate, all the QA issues or adding a ton of crete?"
obviously a ton of concrete is within most folks capability, but i am still making the assertion that masking problems
with a concrete anchor is not the correct way to do things. it comes off to me lilke someone with a rod knocking in their car just turning up the radio so as not to hear the knocking,,, can't hear it so therefore it is ok?
"Saying no broken listeroid cranks from the tiny sample you have with negligible hours is rather like saying next years camaro is the best one ever built, you have to wait 20 years to know that."
seems a bit like conjecture on top of theory to me,,, theory in that moving the center of mass is a design criteria, and conjecture as to whether the listeroid cranks may fail over the long haul. or visa versa
"the default assumption is that tens of millions of lister installed hours and the bulk of engineering knowledge on fatigue is not faulty or erroneous"
i may be taking an opposing view to yours on resilient mounting but i am not going to part with you on your statement.
"Lister documentation always states the concrete block, and never states resilient mounts, what allows you to discount the single most relevant piece of documentation out there? Do you think Lister just forgot to mention resilient mounts?"
just because they don't make mention of resilient mounting, does not negate their possible implimentation. what would negate the implimentation would have been some mention from the lister folks about not using resilient mounts.
so i think they forgot to mention them? no. what is more likely than not is the availability of an approved and engineered mounting system using resilient mounts. it is obvious they never went there, just as every other stationary engine manufacture has done,, they leave it up to the equipment manufacture to engineer and design their own mounting system.
otherwise, folks like waukesha, briggs, wisconsin etc, where resilient mounts are used by some manufactures would have the engine manufactures name stamped on the mounts, which is never the case.
"Do you think if they had succeded they would have simply omitted it from every one of millions of instruction manuals printed?"
no...
but untill i see some reference that they even tried, why am i to assume that they indeed did try?
"The concrete block is an integral part of the design, there is nothing new or exceptional in this, unless you are new to stationary equipment."
i am not new to stationary equipment..
the use of concrete as a structural member of any machine design is a poor choice, the vairables are too great.
mix ratio's, water content, rebar or other supports, aggragate consistancy,type and quality, cure rates, etc are too numerous, further..
there are countless examples of SOMs with their cast iron bases being lagged down to wood decks, concrete floors and in some cases just sitting there running forever, so i am left to believe that instead of moving the center of mass into the block, the ton of concrete is simply a structural stiffening agent just as the SOM cast iron base is. this i would accept as fact.
"The concrete block is an integral part of the design"
can you provide documentation that the concrete block was indeed an original part of the design, and not something that followed after the design and manufacture of the engine? i would be fascinated to see reference to this fact, it would be the first mention of any manufacture having done so, that i am aware of.
"wait and see if his engine lasts longer in between rebuilds"
of course it will last longer, for the following reasons
1. the sand will be removed,
2. tolerances will be much tighter,
3. big end oiling issues will be corrected
4. the correct grade of oil will be used
5. etc etc etc.
so how we ever going to know whether these changes are responcible for an increase in longevity over that of using the ton of concrete? i would submit that the above changes and others will have a dramatically higher impact on lifespan over that of simply using the concrete.
"if tens of millions of installed hours from Listers won't convince you, perhaps a few thou from mr belk will."
we have come full circle again here, clearly listeroids are not listers. listeroids can be improved to perhaps the quality of a lister,,, perhaps
after all of this discussion, i still have not seen sound reasoning behind the assertion that a steel structure properly engineered, properly built and implimented would have a detrimental effect on the longevity of the engine reqardless of wheter or not it is a lister or a (brought up to lister standards) listeroid.
by reasoning of the SOM's use of the cast iron base, and in some cases being left to sit on a floor and running for decades, it is apparent that the real factor here (if indeed there is one) is one of stiffening the case of the lister and not the moving of the center of mass.
you say do the vector analysis,, fine,,, do it on the engine lagged to the ton of concrete,,, yes forces will be moved into the concrete, but then
use the same engine, virtually the same forces at play and bolt it to a som base, now the vectors are all widely different, and cannot be transferred to the concrete as in the first example. clearly they are not being transferred from the engine case, thru the castiron base to the floor if it is just sitting there, or lagged to a wood deck, or even for that matter a thin concrete floor.
which brings me back to the use of a steel torque box design, which in reality is nothing more than a fabricated som base, very rigid, and large enough to spread the torque, weight and other stresses over a larger footprint.
one final question
if as you say, the ton of concrete is needed for a lister/oid to live, then does a som lagged to a wood deck, or left sitting on a concrete floor have a dramatically shorther lifespan?
respectfully
bob g
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"lubricant technology evolved dramatically over the lifetime of the CS, the lube system adapted to suit."
that assumes they got the design right in the first place, which they clearly did not. the top hole oiling and top shell
grooves while working on a 3/1 or maybe a 5/1 hardly followed good engineering design.
Bob, my motor is over half a century old, has an unknown exact number of hours on it, but known to be in excess of 50,000 hours, standard dimensions (eg no regrind or bore) throughout, still starts (judging from other threads) easier than your new listeroids, not a whiff of smoke, yadda yadda yadda, And this is something that is "clearly" poor design???
"do the math and the vector analysis, you will see that shifting the centre of mass outside the block makes a dramatic difference."
absolutely, could not agree more.... if one shifts the center of mass, from the block theortetically that is a good thing, but...
why do you deny me my contension that i too can move the center of mass from the block into a steel structure and use resilient mounts?
You CAN use a steel structure to shift the centre of mass, but you aren't, not unless you are using 12" RSJ and building a vertical stand for the Listeroid. Your Steel frame does not weigh a ton and have a centre of mass that sits nearly two feet below the base of the crankcase, correct.?
"which is the easiest variable to eliminate, all the QA issues or adding a ton of crete?"
obviously a ton of concrete is within most folks capability, but i am still making the assertion that masking problems
with a concrete anchor is not the correct way to do things. it comes off to me lilke someone with a rod knocking in their car just turning up the radio so as not to hear the knocking,,, can't hear it so therefore it is ok?
err, tell me where I suggested anyone should just uncrate their listeroid, sand and all, and just slapping it on a great block of granite would cure everything?
"Saying no broken listeroid cranks from the tiny sample you have with negligible hours is rather like saying next years camaro is the best one ever built, you have to wait 20 years to know that."
seems a bit like conjecture on top of theory to me,,, theory in that moving the center of mass is a design criteria, and conjecture as to whether the listeroid cranks may fail over the long haul. or visa versa
a/ it isn't theory that moving the centre of mass is a design criteria, it is written in every single lister instruction book, mount it solid on a large block of concrete, no theory there.
b/ Listers and oids are not made from the few materials that do not fatigue, so fatigue will happen if allowed to, and there is nowhere else for it to show up but in the crankshaft assembly, no theory there either.
i am not new to stationary equipment..
the use of concrete as a structural member of any machine design is a poor choice, the vairables are too great.
mix ratio's, water content, rebar or other supports, aggragate consistancy,type and quality, cure rates, etc are too numerous, further..
there are countless examples of SOMs with their cast iron bases being lagged down to wood decks, concrete floors and in some cases just sitting there running forever, so i am left to believe that instead of moving the center of mass into the block, the ton of concrete is simply a structural stiffening agent just as the SOM cast iron base is. this i would accept as fact.
Apart from my own Start-o-matic which is sat outside on a trolley, and a couple that go to rallies and sit on trolleys and do not work for a living, and my mates which is not yet ready to be installed, I have NEVER, EVER, EVER, seen a start-o-matic or any other kind of CS that was NOT mounted as per lister specs to a solid concrete block, with the sole exception of ONE in a converted steam shovel and ONE mounted on a large steel barge, and that is out of what must be hundreds over near as dammit 40 years.
where are your countless examples coming from?
"The concrete block is an integral part of the design"
can you provide documentation that the concrete block was indeed an original part of the design, and not something that followed after the design and manufacture of the engine? i would be fascinated to see reference to this fact, it would be the first mention of any manufacture having done so, that i am aware of.
direct straight from Dursley and said in my presence at least twice that I can remember, even before the fire Lister were notorious for not sharing documents, since the fire there can't be many to share, except those given to some strange reason to a couple of authors who themselves keep to NDA's and keep them secret.
after all of this discussion, i still have not seen sound reasoning behind the assertion that a steel structure properly engineered, properly built and implimented would have a detrimental effect on the longevity of the engine reqardless of wheter or not it is a lister or a (brought up to lister standards) listeroid.
I never said you couldn't achieve the same ends, in theory, with steel, or many other things.
by reasoning of the SOM's use of the cast iron base, and in some cases being left to sit on a floor and running for decades, it is apparent that the real factor here (if indeed there is one) is one of stiffening the case of the lister and not the moving of the center of mass.
where do these "sitting on the floor" listers come from, I have never seen one.... never.
the Lister commissioning engineer, after your engine was delivered to the nearest railway station or port, after you had collected it and taken it to the site, would not commission it unless it was sat on a plinth or block.
these things cost more than houses, you think anyone quibbled about a couple of yards of concrete vs the warranty?
you say do the vector analysis,, fine,,, do it on the engine lagged to the ton of concrete,,, yes forces will be moved into the concrete, but then
use the same engine, virtually the same forces at play and bolt it to a som base, now the vectors are all widely different, and cannot be transferred to the concrete as in the first example. clearly they are not being transferred from the engine case, thru the castiron base to the floor if it is just sitting there, or lagged to a wood deck, or even for that matter a thin concrete floor.
which brings me back to the use of a steel torque box design, which in reality is nothing more than a fabricated som base, very rigid, and large enough to spread the torque, weight and other stresses over a larger footprint.
no it does not, in the same way a 4 ton slab will not, please, if you are interested, read at least one of the books I listed, all will become clear.
you need to shift the centre of mass of Lister + mounting system down below the crankcase ideally, and crank radius minimally, a SOM base does NOT do this.
one final question
if as you say, the ton of concrete is needed for a lister/oid to live, then does a som lagged to a wood deck, or left sitting on a concrete floor have a dramatically shorther lifespan?
define "dramatically"
I posted a picture of a broken crank, given the original design brief was NEVER fail, then ANY failure is a dramatic reduction in lifespan, so say I have another 100,000 hours on mine before I consider a regrind or rebuild, not an unreasonable assumption, but if I run it under load on the trolley it is on now I get 25,000 hours, the loss of 75,000 hours isn't the significant item in that scenario, rebuilding the bottom end is no big deal, breaking the crank is the significant item, cos then it's dead jack and then you have no option but scrap it or do a ground up back to factory spec and fuck the cost.
why risk fucking up a perfectly good piece of machinery just to avoid pouring some concrete?
It is still only 4 bolts to move it, and a few hours to break up the concrete.
labour only, no cost in materials.
why oh why oh why are people so dead set against doing this and making it seem like they are being asked to dig another panama canal?
what could be easier or cheaper than pouring (or breaking up) a yard or two of concrete?
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"what could be easier or cheaper than pouring (or breaking up) a yard or two of concrete?"
For the breaking up part, just about anything ;D
But seriously, If I wanted to ,say, take my listeroid down to the dam, then back to the shed for shearing, then off to the house for power generation, then some sort of mobile setup is a lot easier than pouring a few blocks of concrete and unmounting/remounting an engine. I know, a lister is not a mobile thing. But when they cost as much as a house, and you could only afford one engine, what did people do? For that matter, what the heck did they do in days or yore when they adapted large singles into boats that can't float that extra mass?
And how much *is* a replacement crank for a listeroid anyway?
And Guy_F / Bob - I'm still missing the reason why you need to shift the centre of mass away from the crank radius. I don't have the books available (or, frankly, the knowledge in ME) to sort it out myself.
Once you mount it to a rigid block, the only flexing is in the crankshaft due to applied forces from the conrod, right? Nothing else can move much - I mean, relative to the crankshaft and it's bearings? So can anyone tell me what happens to a listeroid and it's crankcase mounted on a lightweight frame than can relatively easily move/orbit around the centre of mass? Do the applied forces / moments on the crankshaft change much due to the orbit of the crankcase? If you take the theoretical and say that the displacement lags 90 deg from the applied force, what does it do?
If you're going to explain, use small words. Diagrams or online references would be good. Pop-up picturebooks would be even better ;).
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Guy:
before i get started i would like to make a few statements
1. i own only one 25/2 listeroid
2. it will not be pressed into a mission critical service, but rather standby and special purpose uses of limited runtimes
3. i am not opposed to the use of a ton of concrete, for my anticipated use
4. i would suspect that the use of a ton of concrete will suffice the needs for the vast majority of users quite admirably
5. my position in this arguement is simply that the ton of concrete is not necessarily the only right way to mount the engine
6. i appreciate your time and effort in this arguement more than you probably realize, i also appreciate your patience with me
in this discussion.
7. my involvement in this discussion is to further explore the issue, to sort out fact from conjecture, and to learn what i can.
8. i am in no way taking the position that rubber mounting the lister/oid is better than mounting the engine to a block of concrete, but rather an alternative that if properly designed should not be detrimental to the engine.
9. mounting the engine to a specified concrete base i would agree is one way, the recommended way of mounting the engine in question by the manufacture of the oem product.
10. it is my contension that if one was to do the math, and engineer a steel subframe, that is sufficiently rigid to add support to the engine properly, there should be no reason that this subframe could not be mounted on some form of resilient mounts.
my reasoning for #10 above is simply an observation of the two forms of mounting that are common with original listers, one being mounted directly to the concrete base, and the other with the engine mounted to the cast iron base of the SOM.
if one was to do the vector physic's for the concrete block he would find that of course the center of mass will be moved to a specific point within the block at a specific rpm, load, and harmonic. this point will move according to differences in rpm, loading and harmonics. there are also other harmonics that will have specific points within the block as well. this is a given and i will accept that as should any reasonable thinking person. but...
when applying the same vector physic's to the SOM and its cast iron base things change dramatically, you no longer have simple vectors to work with but the angles all will change when they enter the cast iron base and are distributed to the outer flange of the base, then thru to the base beit concrete, steel, wood or earth.
i cannot reconcile the two vector groups (concrete vs som cast iron), this leaves me with what i would assume to be a reasonable conclusion that the base is basically a stiffening agent, and an agent to distribute the vibration and stresses away from the engine.
the stresses on the engine mounts are dramatically higher when bolted to the concrete base as opposed the stesses of the mounting bolts of the SOM to the floor, by reason of spreading out these forces, torques, vibrations, moments etc. so...
clearly rubber mounting the engine to any base is a horrible idea, there simply is too much force involved, and there is no place for these forces to be distributed and reduced by reason of the relatively narrow bolt pattern of the engine. but...
once these forces, torques etc are spread out thru a larger base, they are sufficiently reduced to the point that resilient mounting should cause no problem with longevity of the engine provided that, this subframe is made to be very rigid in all planes. it has to be thought of as part of the engine. and the resilient mounts will have to be such that they work in the frequency of the predominant harmonic, say 10 hz.
alternatively i follow your logic in that one could construct the block of concrete and sit it on a rubber pad, perhaps a high density pad. this should mitigate alot of the vibration that would be transfered thru to other parts of the structure.
now in responce to your comments
"Bob, my motor is over half a century old, has an unknown exact number of hours on it, but known to be in excess of 50,000 hours, standard dimensions (eg no regrind or bore) throughout, still starts (judging from other threads) easier than your new listeroids, not a whiff of smoke, yadda yadda yadda, And this is something that is "clearly" poor design???"
i perhaps overstepped myself a bit here, yes the lister is a fine design, is it perfect? in my opinion no. there are issues with oiling that apparently were not much of an issue if at all with the original lister engines. the overall design is a good and time proven design, what i find fault with are mainly the design of the big end brg with its top oiling and grooves in the top shell of that brg, that design does not follow good design form, but rather a design that is warned against in many text's. yes it worked well in the originals at up to 6 hp, but has problems when applied to higher rpm (1000) and higher power densities (8-12 plus)
"You CAN use a steel structure to shift the centre of mass, but you aren't, not unless you are using 12" RSJ and building a vertical stand for the Listeroid. Your Steel frame does not weigh a ton and have a centre of mass that sits nearly two feet below the base of the crankcase, correct.?"
you are correct in this statement, but neither does the SOM cast iron base! and..
the SOM setup runs forever too, correct?
"err, tell me where I suggested anyone should just uncrate their listeroid, sand and all, and just slapping it on a great block of granite would cure everything?"
you didnt allude to anything other than Jack Belks experience, who knows how long that engne would have run mounted as it was if it had been properly prepared, cleaned, balanced and blueprinted to near lister spec's.
i took from your example that bolting the engine to a ton of concrete would have made it run longer. perhaps i misunderstood your meaning?
"a/ it isn't theory that moving the centre of mass is a design criteria, it is written in every single lister instruction book, mount it solid on a large block of concrete, no theory there."
fair enough,, i will take your word for it that it is written that way, but i havent seen evidence of the math to support it.
"b/ Listers and oids are not made from the few materials that do not fatigue, so fatigue will happen if allowed to, and there is nowhere else for it to show up but in the crankshaft assembly, no theory there either."
certainly all materials have fatigue limits,
as for the crankshaft being the only place, certainly not. brgs, bolts, crankcase mounting flanges are a few more spots of concern. i would also submit that at the power densities we are dealing with the crankshaft if filleted properly, made without flaws of decent material, and maintaining proper tolerances should be nearly indistructable, unless some weird harmonic is at play or some other outside force overloads it such as a shock load.
"I never said you couldn't achieve the same ends, in theory, with steel, or many other things"
thank you,,, and i never said that mounting to concrete was the wrong way either.
"these things cost more than houses, you think anyone quibbled about a couple of yards of concrete vs the warranty"
i am certain as death that they didnt argue a bit. who would?, but i am also pretty sure and find it likely that lister worked with at least a few users in mounting the engine in other ways, and warranted the engine as well.
"you need to shift the centre of mass of Lister + mounting system down below the crankcase ideally, and crank radius minimally, a SOM base does NOT do this."
then pray tell how did your SOM last so many years? clearly there is more at play here.
"I posted a picture of a broken crank, given the original design brief was NEVER fail, then ANY failure is a dramatic reduction in lifespan, so say I have another 100,000 hours on mine before I consider a regrind or rebuild, not an unreasonable assumption, but if I run it under load on the trolley it is on now I get 25,000 hours, the loss of 75,000 hours isn't the significant item in that scenario, rebuilding the bottom end is no big deal, breaking the crank is the significant item, cos then it's dead jack and then you have no option but scrap it or do a ground up back to factory spec and fuck the cost.
why risk fucking up a perfectly good piece of machinery just to avoid pouring some concrete?"
now we can agree,,,, if i had an original lister or lister SOM, i would mount it as recommended, on a yard of concrete.
i see no reason to attempt to reengineer what has worked for a very long time, most especially on an original engine. mainly because i have a soft spot for original iron,,, i have no such loyalty to a clone, for a couple of reasons
1. the cost of a lister vs a roid, is quite different, when it comes to broken parts
2. in 50 years, or a hundred the lister will have significant collector value and should be kept as such, the listeroid will never be worth more than when it was new, it will have no appreciable collector value
"your concrete statement"
fair enough, certainly it is not a big deal for most applications.
finally....
we can agree that the use of concrete is prudent where one can use it he probably should.
now i would like to discuss how in the event that one cannot use concrete or does not want to use concrete what are his options, clearly there are many concerns that have to be addressed.
perhaps now we can move in the direction of determining how best to accomplish this other goal, with the purpose of allowing some mobility, some vibration abatement and with a minimum of stress placed back on the engine itself. i am fully aware that there is going to be a comprimise here, perhaps one of longevity. but we are talking about a listeroid, not a collector engine.
my thinking is, if it can be determined that such a mounting system can be engineered and built, even if it cuts the lifespan of the engine by 50-75% but enables better utilization of the engine, it is a comprimise alot of folks are going to be willing to make. and yes i will join you in beating the shit out of anyone contemplating doing such with an original lister :)
bob g
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if one was to do the vector physic's for the concrete block he would find that of course the center of mass will be moved to a specific point within the block at a specific rpm, load, and harmonic. this point will move according to differences in rpm, loading and harmonics. there are also other harmonics that will have specific points within the block as well. this is a given and i will accept that as should any reasonable thinking person. but...
when applying the same vector physic's to the SOM and its cast iron base things change dramatically, you no longer have simple vectors to work with but the angles all will change when they enter the cast iron base and are distributed to the outer flange of the base, then thru to the base beit concrete, steel, wood or earth.
the concrete block for an iron base such as SOM or pump base will be correspondingly more massive than a concrete block for a bare CS only.
you are introducing a variable on one side of your argument and then ignoring the effects of that variable on the other.
i cannot reconcile the two vector groups (concrete vs som cast iron), this leaves me with what i would assume to be a reasonable conclusion that the base is basically a stiffening agent, and an agent to distribute the vibration and stresses away from the engine.
the base serves many purposes, most of them "engineering" eg ensuring easy mounting and alignment, the SOM has a larger footprint and therefore a correspondingly larger concrete block.... there is nothing to reconcile as you are looking at literally two different structures, not one.
the stresses on the engine mounts are dramatically higher when bolted to the concrete base as opposed the stesses of the mounting bolts of the SOM to the floor, by reason of spreading out these forces, torques, vibrations, moments etc. so...
the stresses on the engine mounts, whether bolted to concrete, the SOM base, a pump base, or a fabricated steed base, are identical, think about it, you did not redesign the crankcase.
clearly rubber mounting the engine to any base is a horrible idea, there simply is too much force involved, and there is no place for these forces to be distributed and reduced by reason of the relatively narrow bolt pattern of the engine. but...
once these forces, torques etc are spread out thru a larger base, they are sufficiently reduced to the point that resilient mounting should cause no problem with longevity of the engine provided that, this subframe is made to be very rigid in all planes. it has to be thought of as part of the engine. and the resilient mounts will have to be such that they work in the frequency of the predominant harmonic, say 10 hz.
you KEEP talking about torque, it isn't an issue, centre of mass of the entire system is the issue, and how it alters the vectors of forces from imbalance in the internal moving components of the engine.
alternatively i follow your logic in that one could construct the block of concrete and sit it on a rubber pad, perhaps a high density pad. this should mitigate alot of the vibration that would be transfered thru to other parts of the structure.
hydraulic mounting (floating in a pool) is quite common and simple and cheap where vibration isolation is desired,
now in responce to your comments
"Bob, my motor is over half a century old, has an unknown exact number of hours on it, but known to be in excess of 50,000 hours, standard dimensions (eg no regrind or bore) throughout, still starts (judging from other threads) easier than your new listeroids, not a whiff of smoke, yadda yadda yadda, And this is something that is "clearly" poor design???"
i perhaps overstepped myself a bit here, yes the lister is a fine design, is it perfect? in my opinion no. there are issues with oiling that apparently were not much of an issue if at all with the original lister engines. the overall design is a good and time proven design, what i find fault with are mainly the design of the big end brg with its top oiling and grooves in the top shell of that brg, that design does not follow good design form, but rather a design that is warned against in many text's. yes it worked well in the originals at up to 6 hp, but has problems when applied to higher rpm (1000) and higher power densities (8-12 plus)
you are doing it again.
the Lister design was first class, someone dicked with it and made a twice the size engine, and that may have issues, the SOLE person to blame here is the person who dicked with the design.
I really don't think you, many other people here, or people who write "many texts" understand the Lister lube system.
THERE IS NO FAILURE MODE FOR SPLASH LUBE, OR FOR OIL RING LUBE.
Got that, it can NEVER go wrong or stop working, as long as there is oil in the crankcase.
As long as there is oil in the crankcase, there is sufficient lubrication to achieve near idefinite lifespans at full load.
The KISS principle taken to the extreme.
Do you not get this, Lister were quite aware of other methods of lubrication, but NOTHING even comes close to the simplicity and resilience of splash and oil ring, if the motor is turning and it has oil, then splash and oil ring will lube everything, there is literally nothing to go wrong and nothing to service or wear out, EVER.
The problem IS NOT higher power densities, the problem is some doofus simply making everything bigger and assuming it will work as well in a 25/2 as it did in a 12/2, that is a basic, simple and fundamental engineering mistake.
That is not listers fault, or a design flaw.
"You CAN use a steel structure to shift the centre of mass, but you aren't, not unless you are using 12" RSJ and building a vertical stand for the Listeroid. Your Steel frame does not weigh a ton and have a centre of mass that sits nearly two feet below the base of the crankcase, correct.?"
you are correct in this statement, but neither does the SOM cast iron base! and..
the SOM setup runs forever too, correct?
what is this fixation / mind block about the SOM base?
you put the base on a poured concrete block, nobody ran them on the base only, the base is there so the shipped in separate boxes complete system could be assembled and aligned etc fast and easy and properly, pour crete and mount base, cure, then mount engine etc on base.
certainly all materials have fatigue limits,
some dont actually, and some sort of self anneal / heal, quite rare but they do exist, what you normally come acrosss is things like treated titanium alloys, which, provided you stay within certain limits, basically show infinite cyclic immunity to fatigue, eg basically they do not fatigue.
as for the crankshaft being the only place, certainly not. brgs, bolts, crankcase mounting flanges are a few more spots of concern. i would also submit that at the power densities we are dealing with the crankshaft if filleted properly, made without flaws of decent material, and maintaining proper tolerances should be nearly indistructable, unless some weird harmonic is at play or some other outside force overloads it such as a shock load.
"wierd harmonics" are exactly what causes fatigue matey, and wierd harmonics are moved (because you can't eliminate them) by moving the centre of mass, it is those wierd harmonics that tear a big audio speaker to shreds anywhere except inside its massive cabinet, even at low low power ratings, it is those wierd harmonics that shatter glass.
harmonics and fatigue go hand in hand, the fact that you have only just brought them up suggests to me you haven't really got a grip on what fatigue really is, and perhaps my bending wire example didn't help matters.
then pray tell how did your SOM last so many years? clearly there is more at play here.
you see a picture, it impacts your brain, it eliminates all further thought and reasoning, one of the reasons I refuse to tell students things or show them things, instead I lay it out and make them work it out for themselves.
1/ you have seen a picture of my SOm, like many owned by gentleman collectors, from one of whom I purchased mine in feb this year, sat on a wooden trolley with cast iron wheels.
2/ you have some recollection of me saying before estimated hours were IRO 70k, and age was 50+ years.
3/ you put 1 and 2 together and assume it did all those hours under load on that bloody trolley, no fucking way.
I didn't take it off because I knew I was moving, which I have just done, and you will note my ultimate plans has a couple of tons of lead, not concrete, shifting the centre of mass, and just because I happened to show a video of starting ot like that don't mean it ever ran like that, except the gentleman collector I bought it from who was so negligent he allowed it to frost damage, who ran 200 watts worth of 25 watt bulbs off it at show for a few hours a day once or twice a year.
assumptions will kill you.
1. the cost of a lister vs a roid, is quite different, when it comes to broken parts
2. in 50 years, or a hundred the lister will have significant collector value and should be kept as such, the listeroid will never be worth more than when it was new, it will have no appreciable collector value
you're making those assumptions again.....
in 50 or 100 years you have no idea of the value of a working listeroid, it may be worthless except as a curio, or it may be worth a man year of labour.
all it takes is a law banning them, or a law showing up engines with a rated speed slower than tickover on a modern engine, or global economy to work its course and there is no more third world labour to exploit so everything costs its true worth and listeroids cost as much as arrows.
"your concrete statement"
fair enough, certainly it is not a big deal for most applications.
finally....
we can agree that the use of concrete is prudent where one can use it he probably should.
where on earth can u not use concrete?
now i would like to discuss how in the event that one cannot use concrete or does not want to use concrete what are his options, clearly there are many concerns that have to be addressed.
perhaps now we can move in the direction of determining how best to accomplish this other goal, with the purpose of allowing some mobility, some vibration abatement and with a minimum of stress placed back on the engine itself. i am fully aware that there is going to be a comprimise here, perhaps one of longevity. but we are talking about a listeroid, not a collector engine.
my thinking is, if it can be determined that such a mounting system can be engineered and built, even if it cuts the lifespan of the engine by 50-75% but enables better utilization of the engine, it is a comprimise alot of folks are going to be willing to make. and yes i will join you in beating the shit out of anyone contemplating doing such with an original lister :)
sp mount it on a tank, and fill or empty the tank with a phase change liquid / solid via pump when stationary / moving.
Bob, you telling me you can't make a trailer to carry a lister on a concrete block with jack up legs to save the wheel bearings?
You want mobile, just tow the sucker.
You starting to understand my long term milk float plan now?
just like a self propelled gun, all the benefits of both worlds, none of the drawbacks, except you have more work to do cos you want mobile, not static for the next 4 decades.
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First, thanks gentlemen for putting a valuable lesson in print for future reference. For those who don't use a block, murphy's law says the crank will snap at a most inconvenient time.
Guy, I gained a clear understanding why the block is necessary but... your milk float was in the back of my mind all the while. How the hell were you going to combine the SOM+block with the float? Ok, you answered my question on that.
One other thing, LEAD. Denser than concrete for sure so now the dimensions of the block can be manipulated. How do you figure the optimum dimensions when the density of the dampening material increases? What would be the mimimum height? (ie best for towing on a trailer?)
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murphy's law says the crank will snap at a most inconvenient time.
My God there is some crap going on here....Picking the flyshit out of pepper is what I see.....all of these Listers and oids out there and I am still waiting to see the crankshaft with no manufacturing flaws in a balanced engine that broke due to the mounting procedure!.......get 2 of them to show a trend....4 and I'll go get my cement! Those are the facts that prove more than the interpitation of numbers...when you gotem let me know the price of cement is going up!
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Thank you xyzer,
The level of sh** being flung around re: concrete mounting is near-unbelievable.
Many of the Listeroids putt along very happily on wooden 6X8s or?, at least two or three layers high, and with the crossings not laying on top of the ones underneath.
Those readers here with even a modicum of common sense know that Briggs and Stratton sells far more engines in a year than the total Lister produced, and they run very happily in all sorts of situations for years and years.
Yup, Briggs has been around almost 100 years, sells very inexpensive single cylinder engines using a bare minimum of steel and iron, and if the engines were AT ALL PRONE TO BREAKAGE, DON'T YOU THINK THEY WOULD SPECIFY CONCRETE MOUNTS??????
Think about it.
There are no doubt those situations where concrete mounting is the best solution. There are also many situations where it is not necessary, nor needed, nor even desirable.
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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.
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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.
Well I've balanced and mounted a listeroid on rubber....have they?...have you? That's who I am! I've bought and installed a 32 cnc machines and they don't grout and anchor em any more! They set on pads..Ideas change.... I've fixed more engineering f-up's than I can count from nuclear to the shuttle to Hellfire missles....I've been dealing with rotating crap for 40 years..... So?....I ain't no engineer....what does that have to do with it? As I have said before if I was never going to move it I would also mount a "Balanced" Listeriod on a block-o-cement.....A lot less thinking goes on to do that....and if someone can show me that the listeroid was designed to the point it has to be mounted exactly as the manufacturer of 50 years ago says show me the broken shafts!...I deal with facts not what the engineers of 50-70 years ago were thinking .....I know from all of the older machinery I have delt with they were always overbuilt... They didn't load a 3D model in Unigrafics software and run a stress analysis on it! An old engineer told me figure what you need to do the job then go to the next size up....no one will know....to small and you'll never hear the end of it!....If there was a definate problem I'm sure it would have reared its ugly head by now. Bring on the broken shafts...lets see the history....SHOW ME! Thats all! Oh yea...this is what they call a "forum".... I got an opinion also....just not so wordy!.....well maybe this time!
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OK oldnslow,
You said, "Don't fuck that up for the rest of us. " The truth is, the lightweight from the UK with the big mouth is the one who f***s up many with his one-sided posts. Tell you what, he does not f*** it up for me.
The fact is, have been doing this sh** for about 50 years. Have put big and small, heavy and light engines on about everything you can think of, and some you can't. Have "Mickey Moused" hookups beyond belief, and have NEVER had a crankshaft fail. Have even been a leverman., and THAT engine did not break, either!!! Logging shows, sawmills, odd skid-mouthed setups, pumps large and small, dredges, etc, etc, etc. Have operated them on the land, in the water, and in the air.
The Briggs are a VERY fair comparison. Oh, and if you want to compare Listeroids, etc, ask Quinn how f***ing many I own. (too many...) Along with many others...
BobG and his partner do not lead you astray. Neither does JackBelk. Nor does Quinn, or Russell from Kansas. Or many others. But take what everyone says with a grain of salt, and do not treat it as pure truth, because in almost all cases, "truth" has many flavors.
Now, do you want to know something interesting? OK, talked with Dennis E. in Ohio yesterday. He runs twin cylinder Listeroids 24/7, for power generation, pumping water, and co-gen heat. All on undiluted WVO, filtered, chemically treated, and heated. NEVER has carbon buildup. Second to the last day of his show for the year, the Ashwamegh 25/2 broke (wore out) a bronze idler pinion. That engine has centers that are off, so it is REALLY hard on the gears. The bronze gear made it just about 5,000 hours, almost the same hours as the T-6 aluminum idler he used before that. His first gear, a grade 5 P.O.S., lasted about 50 hours, and a grade 20 cast gear made it about 200 hours.
Now for those who want to total up the hours, it will tell you something. These are the sort of engines I like to hear about, because it provides info on how they hold up in really tough situations, even when there are manufacturing deficiencies..
Oh, Dennis also says he will just put in another gear. He says it takes about 20 minutes to install and time. He does not want to mess with an offset idler shaft.
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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.
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One thing we can say about GuyF. is that he may be right or he may be wrong, BUT he can sure type a lot! Where is this picture of the only LISTER crank ever damaged in service? I'd like to take a look.
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I repeat, I posted a picture to this very forum of a busted crank, and that was a genuine quality Lister crank, not some knock off clone of unknown quality, and it was busted by being run for some time without being bolted to a block.
Guy....
1. How long was some time?
2. How balanced is a original Lister? (will they sit on a concrete floor not bolted running?...hey I don't know!)
3. How balanced was that lister? (no one knows this I'm sure)
4. Was there a defect in the crankshaft? ( another unkown)
All of the above reasons are also reasons for the failure correct..? You have to answer these questions to even attempt to convince this amature of your statements.
I bet if you look hard enough there are broken cranks out there that were mounted as Lister recomended.....now what? If I was running a life support system I sure as hell wouldn't be doing it with a Indian Lister!....
I think my statement.."An old engineer told me figure what you need to do the job then go to the next size up....no one will know....to small and you'll never hear the end of it!"....that pretty much falls in line with what the Otis guy said.
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... lots of fluff deleted....
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?
The lack of data is the issue. It's a completely different mount, for one, which you claim will have a completely different effect to the mount you have. So why should I use your hours and mounting system and try to somehow compare it to a resilient mount? Chalk and cheese. If you told me that there was 100K hrs of trials on twenty different types of resilient mounts and 45% of them broke a crankshaft... then I'd take more credence in your words. At the moment, you're just giving me "wooooo! Non-standard mounting baaaaaaad!" noises and much,much handwaving.
it demonstrates nothing except the fact that you don't understand chance.
.... lots of fluff about statistics and russian roulette deleted....
Please calculate the odds of a listeroid crankshaft failing in 20,000 hours on a resilient mount. Do not use your, or listers, existing mounting as a basis of expected life on a resilient mount.
Calculate the crankshaft deformation at a varying engine loads and rpms, taking into account the orbit and loads of the block, piston, conrod and flywheels on resilient mounts. Take crankshaft materials into account, add factor for variable indian quality, add in factor for variable indian balance (which, as I posted somewhere earlier, would be completely missed if bolted rigidly to a bloc-o-crete)
Can you give me a respectable, well-calculated MTBF for that setup? Well, I can't. So I look at the dozen-or-so listeroids here on this forum that have been resiliently mounted in all sorts of conditions and balances and uses, which should give a nice averaging effect to the time between crankshaft failure. So how many hours have they cumulatively done? 20K? 50K hours? How many crankshafts have broken? I've heard of one. Can anyone definitively say, "Oh, yes, this crankshaft was most definitely broken due to internal stress from not having the centre of mass outside the crank radius?".
We're in the field trial here and now. Listers have the advantage of 90 years of field experience, and practically everyone mounted them to blocks - which only shows that blocks work. It doesn't show that anything else will be a miserable failure.
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Guy: "the concrete block for an iron base such as SOM or pump base will be correspondingly more massive than a concrete block for a bare CS only. you are introducing a variable on one side of your argument and then ignoring the effects of that variable on the other."
no sir i am not changing the variable or introducing anything,, we have the following components of the arguement
1. an engine bolted to a concrete block (may) have its center of mass moved to a point within the concrete
2. an engine bolted to a cast iron base such as the SOM will not be as effective as example #1
i am not ignoring the effects, just trying to understand them,,, it has taken some blind faith on my part that indeed the engineers sat down and built their engine with the concrete block as the corner stone of their design.... ok i will accept that for the moment.... but.....
the vectors are all different when you go from engine to SOM cast iron base to concrete,,, now you are asking me to accept and swallow something i am unwilling to chew, based on your statement of "fact".
sorry but i am going to have to see a lot more documentation to support the claim
"the base serves many purposes, most of them "engineering" eg ensuring easy mounting and alignment, the SOM has a larger footprint and therefore a correspondingly larger concrete block.... there is nothing to reconcile as you are looking at literally two different structures, not one."
of course we are looking at two different structures, the concrete blocks,,, but just because one claims the result to be the same, does not make it fact. it is fairly easy to conceptualize and figure the vectors from engine to concrete, but quite another from engine to concrete via the som base. my contention is there is no way that the center of mass is transferred useing the som base.
"the stresses on the engine mounts, whether bolted to concrete, the SOM base, a pump base, or a fabricated steed base, are identical, think about it, you did not redesign the crankcase.
" WOW... i will come back to this statement,,,, seems like perhaps a slip on your part or a clever trap :)
"you are doing it again. the Lister design was first class, someone dicked with it and made a twice the size engine, and that may have issues, the SOLE person to blame here is the person who dicked with the design. I really don't think you, many other people here, or people who write "many texts" understand the Lister lube system. THERE IS NO FAILURE MODE FOR SPLASH LUBE, OR FOR OIL RING LUBE. Got that, it can NEVER go wrong or stop working, as long as there is oil in the crankcase. As long as there is oil in the crankcase, there is sufficient lubrication to achieve near idefinite lifespans at full load. The KISS principle taken to the extreme. Do you not get this, Lister were quite aware of other methods of lubrication, but NOTHING even comes close to the simplicity and resilience of splash and oil ring, if the motor is turning and it has oil, then splash and oil ring will lube everything, there is literally nothing to go wrong and nothing to service or wear out, EVER. The problem IS NOT higher power densities, the problem is some doofus simply making everything bigger and assuming it will work as well in a 25/2 as it did in a 12/2, that is a basic, simple and fundamental engineering mistake. That is not listers fault, or a design flaw.""
first of all i have no doubt that the overall design of the lister is quite good, machining top notch, metals .. virgin... etc.. but...just because something is adequate does not make it of superior design (again i am only in reference to big end oiling) and your points are very valid that it is not listers fault how others have bastardized their design without reguard to consequences.
"what is this fixation / mind block about the SOM base?"
vectors!!! that is the fascination/fixation/problem with your arguement simply put the som base works against the arguement that using vectors to support the transfer of the center of mass.vectors work to support the arguement that the center of mass is transfered directly thru an engine base into the concrete block what fascinates me, is how these vectors forces can be used to transfer the center of mass to the concrete via the som base, you have a much more, vastly more complex vector problem to prove out in support of moving the center of mass.
basically in either arrangement the vectors lines pass thru the engine mounting pad/bolts then...into the concrete on the discrete unit, and ... with the som style mountthru engine mounting pad/bolts then ....these vectors go where? out at approx 90 degree's plus the draft angle of the crankcase, to the flange of the som base i find it unlikely as hell that the lister engineers spent the resources to sort out those vectors,
so i am left with the following it is an assertion on listers part that they the claim that moving the center of mass was no more than a coverup or marketing ploy, designed to make things work, when it was determined that there engine was not rigid enough to work without it.
i have to go on a service call i will continue with your statement later tonight
""the stresses on the engine mounts, whether bolted to concrete, the SOM base, a pump base, or a fabricated steed base, are identical, think about it, you did not redesign the crankcase."
i would like to explore this statement, based on the assumption that lister based their original design on the use of the concrete block.
later
bob g
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Guy:
to continue the arguement :)
""the stresses on the engine mounts, whether bolted to concrete, the SOM base, a pump base, or a fabricated steed base, are identical, think about it, you did not redesign the crankcase."
i have thought about this statement all day,, and would like to comment.
if as you say "bolting the engine to a block of concrete moves the center of mass" then yes you have indeed redesigned the crankcase. if as you say the concrete was a intregal part of the original design then it is indeed part of the crankcase
just as bolting it to a SOM base become part of the crankcase.
bolting it to a steel base becomes part of the crankcase, just as bolting it to a pump base etc.
this is precisely where the flaw in your arguement lies, anything bolted directly to the crankcase becomes part of the crankcase. so...
there is radically different forces, vectors, torques, moments, thumps, or whatever you want to call it when using different bases, so this is precisely why the engineers could not have began their design based on the use of a concrete block. further...
if the stresses on the mounts are identical whether one uses concrete, steel, or SOM, then the stesses where they originate are still the same, presumably from your arguement the crankshaft. because no other stresses are introduced back from the concrete, steel or som base (provided they don't reintroduce feedback harmonics).
concrete is unable to simply absorb these stresses, it is dead. it does not absorb,, it returns whatever is sent to it, or alternatively if you like, it does absorb,,, and therefore is nothing more than a extremely high density ( but not very resilient) mount.
this is my theory of what happened at lister,,, and i figure it is just a viable as your assertion that they engineered the engine based on a block of concrete (at least until someone can come up with documentation of them actually designing the engine on the block of concrete to begin with, and not after they had an engine built)
they built their engine, and it was good, perhaps even great..
then they found that it costs alot to finely finish these engine's complete with excellent balance,, the cost was too high.
someone decided to see where they could cut corners, and powers that be looked at where they could economize.
they did not want to cut back on quality of material, fit and finish,,, but they decided to scrimp a bit on the balance.
with the idea that all would be well if attached to a block of concrete,, hell folks had to bolt it down anyway right?
so now then how do you sell this engine with the idea that it has to be installed on a block of concrete? just like they do it
today, take a negative and turn it into a positive... it is all in marketing and customer perception.
tell em the concrete was engineered to be an intregal part of the engine... the consumer would look at that and think to himself,, seems reasonable,,, boy those guys are really sharp engineers...
and oh wow,,, they are even going to send out an engineer to oversee the installation! they must really make a superior product!
the reality is the engines are great,, they run forever,, mounted to the concrete block...
but this in no way proves or disproves whether or not a well balanced engine, mounted on resilient mounts would experience a higher rate of crankshaft failures.
if you want to sight facts,,, the fact is there are no reports of broken crankshafts that are attributed to not mounting them to a concrete block,, one anecdotal example does not support your arguement.
tag
bob g
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I just thought I would post a few of my thoughts on the subject....
Then I realized I don't care.
And I'm fed up with the tone of this post.
And I deeply respect both Bob and Guy for being more clever than me on the physics of shaking the crap out of things.
But I just don't care, and rather than argue about the benifits of mass dampening vibration and center of mass crap VS internal vibration cancelation and isolation why can't facts and options be posted along with how too and let the user decide what he wants to try.
Honestly No one wants to reads debates that don't come to a resolution we wants facts and answeres.
DOUG
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I just thought I would post a few of my thoughts on the subject....
Then I realized I don't care.
And I'm fed up with the tone of this post.
.........
Honestly No one wants to reads debates that don't come to a resolution we wants facts and answeres.
DOUG
*cough*
http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=1097.0
We're (well - I am ;) ) working on the facts and answers for resilient mounts there. Everyone seems to have agreed upon what's required for solid mounting. I think this thread's more for the introspective, meaning-of-it-all, navel-gazing discussion about the how's and why's of engineering theory past and present. Or perhaps it's just a place for opposing views to clash in a controlled environment ;D.
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Good on you then.
Show me the light.
Doug
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to all concerned or not concerned whichever side you are on:
my participation in this ongoing thread was more of an excersize in theory, and not so much a "to do" or "not to do" for the DIY'er.
i know this thread may have become quite tedious for some, and believe me it was one hell of a lot of work for me to continue the arguement in support of resilient mounts.
the debate stopped a few days ago, because of some off forum communication i received from someone i have alot of respect for (he will remain unnamed by me at this time).
suffice it to say we came to a resolution on the topic in general that both can agree to and also he brough up a very salient point that perhaps has more bearing on the discussion or provides an overriding support for the use of concrete as a foundation,,, that being safety.
i have to agree and stand shoulder to shoulder with him when it comes to concerns of safety.
before i alienate anyone here or piss anyone off, let me start off saying i too am human and have taken risk's that i should not have in my life, so far without serious consequence.
aside from the issue of concrete mount vs resilient mount, i have to agree that mounting to concrete is always the preferred method when it comes to overall safety. Quite frankly rigid mounting to a ton of concrete is hard to argue against as being far safer than any other mounting method.
Sadly there will be those of us that will turn a blind eye in haste and throw together some form of mount without due attention to the consequences of not doing it right, usually when something bad happens someone gets hurt.
i know because in my younger years i too took short cuts and have the scar's to prove it, just as many of you have the same. the problem is one of experience, rather in some cases lack thereof.
it is very easy for someone that has never worked around machinery, to severly underestimate how dangerous mechanical stuff can be.
when you couple this with a beginners basic misunderstanding of horse power, then the problem can really take off.
for instance, a child can use a shop vac with a peak hp of 6hp, no one worries about the kid getting hurt, no one worries about useing a 6 hp lawn mower either,,, so when you think of 6 hp some folks don't see it as much of a threat, until ...
you consider a hp lister with 300 lbs of flywheel has the equivalent of perhaps 300hp available for a second or two, which is an eternity when things go wrong.
it is so easy to become enamored by opening a crate, and if you don't have the experience of being around machinery before, being lulled into complacency and thinking it is only 6 hp.
the concern brought forward by the other party, is very valid, you all know that there is a risk of someone that will underestimate the forces involved and throw together some form of mount that may fail and get either him or a loved one hurt of killed.
you know he is right to bring this point forward, i believe it and so should everyone here.
again my participation in the arguement for the use of resilient mounts was theory, and i no way should steer anyone in the direction of using that sort of mounting unless he is willing to do it right, and accept the risk's envolved in doing so.
i have clearly outlined what i feel is a minimum in the construction of a steel frame for the use of resilient mounts, should you choose to do something less the risk is all on you, also
i would suggest you seek professional advice before constructing any sort of engine mount, and unless you have the capability of constructing the subframe yourself with quality welds and using quality components you should also have someone build it that knows
how to build it right.
i would also like to thank Guy for the vigorous debate, hopefully others might have learned a bit from it too.
i know i did
bob g
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I just thought I would post a few of my thoughts on the subject....
Then I realized I don't care.
And I'm fed up with the tone of this post.
And I deeply respect both Bob and Guy for being more clever than me on the physics of shaking the crap out of things.
But I just don't care, and rather than argue about the benifits of mass dampening vibration and center of mass crap VS internal vibration cancelation and isolation why can't facts and options be posted along with how too and let the user decide what he wants to try.
Honestly No one wants to reads debates that don't come to a resolution we wants facts and answeres.
DOUG
Maybe I was too blunt with this comment. Sorry guys.
I recieved an email today from someone out west of guy who did something the wrong way instead if using the proper tools and recomended methods. Lots of people have there own ways of doing things and find it easy to justify what they did and why its faster easier of better than the accepted norm.
Never crimp a blasting cap with your teeth....
Bolt a Roid to a block of concrete rather than let it dance....
Doug
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the debate stopped a few days ago, because of some off forum communication i received from someone i have alot of respect for (he will remain unnamed by me at this time).
Wasn`t Doug or Dinsdale Piranna was it? I`ll fully understand if you don`t want to say being that there seems to have been a run on soft cushions and comfy pillows at Wallmart recently. ;D
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I got my first 2.5KW Lister startomatic 5 years ago and had no documentation or experiance of these bits of kit.
I got the set home checked the engine oil connected up 2 batteries and fired it up. It ran for a good 6 hours then I switched it off. Next morning I tried to remotely start it and it just made a loud squeeling noise the engine was siezed solid. What had happened was that the oil pump plunger had been pushed down and stayed down and didnt pump any oil around the engine for 6 hours the trough below the crankshaft ran out of oil because it wasnt geting refilled from the main bearings and the crankshaft was siezed to the main bearings. I couldnt get the engine dismantled and the price of just 2 main bearings and 1 bigend bearing was 250GBP let alone any work that might need doing to the crank.
There was a 4.5KW startomatic advertised in the local paper for 350GBP so I went and looked at it Included in the deal I got was a spare engine this engine had got a broken crank and had still been running when the guy switched the set off but was making a funny noise. This engine was bolted to a concrete plinth and the crank broke.
I ran the 4.5KW for 8 to 12 hours a day for 4 years every day and never bolted it down to anything it never moved at all just stayed where it was and never broke its crank
I am rebuilding 2 4.5KW startomatics at the moment for my own use with Indian spares and I for one am delighted with the quality and price of the indian spares time will tell but they certainly look good. These engines will be bolted to concrete blocks.
Anyway 2 points to make
The genuine lister oil system is not failsafe.
Lister crankshafts break whether bolted to a concrete block or not.
Mick
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I got my first 2.5KW Lister startomatic 5 years ago and had no documentation or experiance of these bits of kit.
I got the set home checked the engine oil connected up 2 batteries and fired it up. It ran for a good 6 hours then I switched it off. Next morning I tried to remotely start it and it just made a loud squeeling noise the engine was siezed solid. What had happened was that the oil pump plunger had been pushed down and stayed down and didnt pump any oil around the engine for 6 hours the trough below the crankshaft ran out of oil because it wasnt geting refilled from the main bearings and the crankshaft was siezed to the main bearings. I couldnt get the engine dismantled and the price of just 2 main bearings and 1 bigend bearing was 250GBP let alone any work that might need doing to the crank.
There was a 4.5KW startomatic advertised in the local paper for 350GBP so I went and looked at it Included in the deal I got was a spare engine this engine had got a broken crank and had still been running when the guy switched the set off but was making a funny noise. This engine was bolted to a concrete plinth and the crank broke.
I ran the 4.5KW for 8 to 12 hours a day for 4 years every day and never bolted it down to anything it never moved at all just stayed where it was and never broke its crank
I am rebuilding 2 4.5KW startomatics at the moment for my own use with Indian spares and I for one am delighted with the quality and price of the indian spares time will tell but they certainly look good. These engines will be bolted to concrete blocks.
Anyway 2 points to make
The genuine lister oil system is not failsafe.
Lister crankshafts break whether bolted to a concrete block or not.
Mick
So let me get this straight.
You bought one start-o-matic, took it home, did fuck all of even the most rudimentary checks, ran it 6 hours with no oil pump and it only siezed on cooling after shutdown.
Then you bought another one and the vendor threw in a spare engine that he said ran after the crank broke, and it was bolted to a concrete plinth, as though this is supposed to stop cranks breaking even under negligent operation.
And from this nightmare of machanical abuse and neglect you deduce that the Lister oil system isn't failsafe and even a concrete base won't stop a crank breaking.
Personally I deduce that, though it ain't needed because there is no shortage, it is yet more evidence that you can't make anything idiot proof.
Please post the serial numbers of the two start-o-matics so we can all avoid them like the plague when they come on the market.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A sincere warning to all, now world + dog has realised Listers are worth a bunch of moolah, I'm starting to see some right shit being sold, and I mean run away screaming stuff.
If they were classic bikes or classic cars they would be called "basket cases".
Caveat emptor.
Incidentally this is where british bikes got the reputation for being shite, at one time you could buy honest, used, tired old jampot nortons for a tenner, then they started to get worth money and all of a sudden real heaps of shit were being sold for several hundreds of pounds.... I expect there are parallel scenarios in all markets, guns etc.
There is a lot more I could say but I won't because it involves persons on here and I don't want to make anything personal out of this, suffice to say I know people who will sell cars that I would ask a tenner for as scrap for a few spares but they will sell as runners for lots of money.
Time I quit these forums for a while again, doesn't do me any good to see whats going on and get hot under the collar, and doesn't do anyone else any good to watch me vent spleen.
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Guy,
You are living in the land of Lister...and most of us on this site are remote & far from contact with original "Lister" hardware. What you have to offer us on this forum is both valuable & first hand information from observation & as a passionate owner of an SOM Lister original yourself, it is both trustworthy & knowlegeable ... We are all just guessing on this side of the pond with only the Listeroid copy to compare.
It would be a pitty to have you leave us. We do value your input and there is nothing like info from someone who has been there, done that.
I know another side of you, since I have commissioned you personnaly for my own purchases in the UK, and I am more than pleased by what I have recieved from you in return. The communications were great, the final evauation, with suggestions & concerns were both astute, unbiased, realistic and honest. I could not have asked for more. The pictures....supurbe down to the last detail. Thank you and please stay with us. The game is not over yet! It is just beginning. binnie
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Binnie, thanks for the kind words, but someone gives me money to do something then it behooves me to give them that thing to the best of my ability, the situation (someone buying something sight unseen on the strength of a couple of small pictures and a few lines of advert) and the other factors (that someone being too far away to see for themselves) make it a fairly straightforwards job.
I'll say up front what I said to you off channel.
Your unit has "issues", but nothing that would worry me too much. It isn'y quite in the area of honest and benign neglect that I like, because then you only have to deal with the ravages of time and circumstance, but on the other hand it is not an example of mechanical vandalism, abuse and wilful neglect, which is what we are starting to see elsewhere now that they are going up in value, the one after yours topped 4 figures on ebay. Like yours this was a set that is not sold as being 100% working and generating power and ready for duty after a basic service and inspection.
I know I like engineering and I like doing or seeing quality work, and I know that puts me out at one end of the scale, but tales of buying engines and not doing even the most basic checks before running them and then blowing the bottom end when you discover you have run with no oil pump for six hours is nothing short of vandalism and abuse in my book, and if I was god I would ban people like that from ever owning any machinery.
Fat chance I know, and I;ve seen god knows how many different bits of lovely machinery of exotica reduced to basket cases because of it. As I get older it kills me just as much to watch it every time, what is the fucking point in killing something throught stupidity when there are people out there who would make a good go of it.
But I have now seen many example of that place where the wreckers have moved in, and things that would have been better left as a box of bits with benign neglect being assembled with some of the lowest quality workmanship imaginable, run like that and abused so benign neglect turns into mechanical vandalism and abuse, and sold as runners when in reality they are basket cases of parts whirling in close formation on the way to the scrap yard, useless for anything except an example of how not to do it.
Unfortunately most people on here don't have the right engineering skill set or experience to appreciate this up front, so they will pay over the odds for a basket case and lo and behold old listers get a bad name for being shite and unreliable old pieces of crap.... the same thing happened with old british bikes etc.
On a personal note this offends me too, because it also cheapens the role of the engineer or artisan, it is a pile of shit crap old engine so why pay an "engineer" to fettle it properly, so nobody experiences the smoothness, reliability, character and steam engine like qualities of a properly fettled Lister CS.
Ask Geno about his bearings and a man called Zig.
Reduce listers to old crap pieces of shite and no way he would have taken the chance of going to a Zig, and that is a crying shame, for his motor, for himself, for zig, and for everyone else when zig decides to quit cos it ain't worth it.
it's a swansong
cheers
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Zig owns the Babbitt Pot http://www.thebabbittpot.com/
My original bearings couldn’t be used because of some damage done in the Indian test run.
http://www.genedevera.com/listeroid/3-1-06/P1010001.jpg
Before I found Zig I tried to make my spare ones work. I had 2 sets of spares and had never worked on the bottom end of an engine before. Pistons, rings, cams, valves, bearings and the like yes. Bottom ends no. I researched things well, knew the theory, bought the plastigauge and Prussian blue but on one set of spares I got wiping within 20-30 hours. It had some knock and the bottom end was not going to last. I didn’t know it at the time but these bearings had no crush. I probably caused that trying to get the correct clearance. My bad, my lack of experience.
http://www.genedevera.com/temp/wiping.jpg
Hotater fragged some bearings on his Fuking about the same time so I stopped working on the engine and began to think. There was all this talk here about hollow dippers, oil pressurized bearings and more oil grooves in the shells. Originals didn’t need it so there was something else wrong. It had to be the journal, the shells or both. It was time to call support.
A while later I asked for GF’s advise and got some.
GF quote
Engineer hat on, pretend you just paid me good money for this advice.
Lister quote 3 thou as max permissible wear. so you're screwed before you start with those tolerances.
1/ I assume you have TRB mains, go and find out about shimming the end covers to adjust preload on the TRBs, ideally go and get your hands dirty somewhere learning about them in the meantime.
2/ meantime --- go and find a PROPER machinist, leg work and questions, will probably be an older guy, and give him your crankshaft, conrod, shells and ideally piston and rings too, explain clearly that they are a clone of what was primo quality english engineering to swiss watch standards, and ask him to use his skill and experience to bring out of that material the things that lie within.
3/ do this right and spend SOME money now and you won't have to do it again for years, and will save a fortune, if necessary pay the machinst extra (I am deadly serious) so that you can stand over his shoulder and have him explain to you the measurements he is taking and the remedial work he will do --- If you find a good machinst I WILL GIVE YOU THE MONEY you spend on looking over his shoulder if you do not agree afterwards it was money well spent, I am that serious about this. THis is a bet I have made many times over the years, no-one has ever collected.
the secret is finding a GOOD machinist, and I mean bloody good, and then having the faith to put your trust and money in his hands in exchange for his expertise and experience.
right now you will be saying "but if he can do a job as good as you say, why learn because I won't use it again", but that is the nature of knowledge, you have to gain it before you can understand how to apply it, you WILL learn things that you WILL use every week.
End GF quote
Where the hell am I going to find someone like that in upstate N.Y.
As it turned out the Washington County Fair was coming up. It’s a big, agriculture oriented, classic Americana type fair. There wasn’t much there in the way of stationary engines but there were over a hundred antique tractors. I only had to talk to a few local tractor guys to find out Zig was the man I needed to see.
I brought the piston, con rod, crank and all my bearings to Zig. It’s a nice little shop, he works alone and has been there a long time. He found the journal to be round, that’s good because he doesn’t have a crank machine, he sends them out. He tried to make my last new set of bearings fit but couldn’t. When he bored them after fitting them in the rod he found the babbitt material to be way to thin and cut through it. I was there to watch him pour my new bearings and a bunch of other ones for a 1917 Packard V12. He also had a V8 block on the bench that was all set up for line boring the crank bearings he made. I wasn’t there all that long but being able to see the things I had only visualized was very informative. I like to ask questions and Zig likes to answer them. Unfortunately that led to him leaving a one piece bearing on the shaft a little to long and he had some trouble removing it. I was only able to stay a little while longer but I will be going back and will hopefully get to help him around the shop.
The engine, with the new bearings, has about 50 hours on it and seems to be running fine. I don’t have any reason to look at the shells, and probably won’t for a long time. I just got done running and hooking up the power line for the house and am writing this on Listeroid power. I’m going to plumb the large, secondary, alternative fuel, fuel tank now.
http://www.genedevera.com/temp/zig-bearing1.jpg
http://www.genedevera.com/temp/zig-bearing2.jpg
I’ve been saying I’m almost done with the engine/engine room for a long time now but I really am close this time and will post a bunch of pics soon on the project page.
http://www.genedevera.com/listeroid/
My thanks to GF and Zig for their help.
Thanks, Geno
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Great story Geno!
and invaluable info on the contact, "Zig." Thanks for that link. Besides the listeroid & SOM lister I have that may need this type of work done once I get it over here, (Zig is not too far from Montreal, Cda.), I also have a small collection of Packards from the 30's, which are still original & running, with minor restoration as needed. Zig sounds like the man I will need to have the motors referbished when I need it. So far they are still amazingly doing their thing with no complaints.
As Guy Fawkes says, he would rather find an original untampered with than one fooled arround with by a novice. So would I. However, when it comes to Listers, we are at the mercy of the market place, and must use our own judgement from remote distance & gamble a little on the odds that we are doing the best thing with the purchase. It is nice to know that "Zig" exists & is available. Thanks binnie.
By the way I am using two such victorian hot water radiators in line, much like yours for the coolant on my 12/2....they are in the kennel above the engine room & working off of siphon circulation. I may add a small Taco pump to the system to get the water moving a little more rapidly. I am amazed that you managed to get the damn thing up so high on the wall. The bloody things are heavy....can understand why you screwed the shit out of the wall bracket. How did you manage to get the cast iron rad up there? Blows me away !
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Oh I am so sorry to have offended the almighty
Insert Quote
I got my first 2.5KW Lister startomatic 5 years ago and had no documentation or experiance of these bits of kit.
What else am I suposed to check if I have no knowledge of these particular engines
Oil I checked it
Water I filled the tank
Connected 2 batteries
It had been passed to me as a working bit of kit I didnt know about hand priming the oil system and I siezed the engine. I had never seen a generator like this before it looked more like a steam engine to me. I didnt have lots of clever people to advise me I had zero information about them It used to belong to a mate of mine and had been working reliably untill his death. His son lent it to me about 6 monthes after it had last run What more could I have checked
How do you tell if the pumps not working when the engines running?
I posted my information so that other people might not make the same mistake as i made.
It is totaly gutting when you sieze your new generator. I actually needed a generator I live off grid. I have been running a startomatic everyday for the last 5 years 8 hours a day weekdays and 12 hours on weekends and they are most wonderfull bits of kit. which I have found very reliable.
I know alot more about startomatics now and allways check the oil pump is working now I also test the mainbearings with a 4 foot prybar under the flywheels check the big end same method through the crankcase door I also clean out the sump and fill with fresh HD 30 diesel oil. I havent made the same mistake again
Anyway 2 points to make
The genuine lister oil system is not failsafe.
Lister crankshafts break whether bolted to a concrete block or not.
(I really don't think you, many other people here, or people who write "many texts" understand the Lister lube system. THERE IS NO FAILURE MODE FOR SPLASH LUBE, OR FOR OIL RING LUBE. Got that, it can NEVER go wrong or stop working, as long as there is oil in the crankcase. As long as there is oil in the crankcase, there is sufficient lubrication to achieve near idefinite lifespans at full load. The KISS principle taken to the extreme. Do you not get this, Lister were quite aware of other methods of lubrication, but NOTHING even comes close to the simplicity and resilience of splash and oil ring, if the motor is turning and it has oil, then splash and oil ring will lube everything, there is literally nothing to go wrong and nothing to service or wear out, EVER.)
Point 1 It does not matter whether I am a vandel or not If the oil pump fails on a lister single cylinder CS engine it will sieze this is fact I have done it It cost me good and it hurt at the time. I am not bothered about mt ego I admit I am a dickhead and honestly admitted what I did. It takes bottle to admit you messed up but I did. What I dont like is statements like above which state opinions as if gospel.
Point 2 Crankshafts break. I only passed on the information because the engine had still been running generating electricity and only when it came to shut off time did it become apparant. I think this is amazing. The set was regluarly serviced and not in bad condition the crank just broke in service and it could have been running for 8 hours like that. The guy didnt know he just got another engine the next day. This was in excess of 5 years ago and his secondhand engine cost him 500 quid from his local generator dealer I personaly do not deduce anything from this just that cranks break whether bolted down to a concrefe block or not.
I thought a forum was for civilised conversation not personal attacks all I am doing is sharing my personal expierance. I have been running these things for 5 years now and have learnt the hard way. They have only become popular again recently
5 years ago there wasnt a wealth of information available and spares parts very expensive if vou could get them. Now I have decent documentation and Indian spares. Thanks to the popularity of listeroids in the US this information is now abundant.2 years ago if you googled lister cs or startomatic you got very little information now there pages and pages. So thank you US cousins. You have done more to promote listers than we in the UK.
I am running a fully up and running 8/1 engined 4.5KW start o matic as I type this This has a totally functioning startomatic system which I use to start the set with I use this system because it charges the batteries as well. It has taken me years to get the startomatic working properly.The second one I got had melted the charging contacts in the control box and I managed to get another control box I connected that up and it vaporised the same contacts again.
Ive got the lister manual now and the contacts need setting up very carefully or else you blow up your contacts. The reason I open myself up to abuse is that I dont want any of you US buyers to make the same mistake as I made.
Before you first start them up make sure the contacts operate in the correct fashion. There is a manual for the 4.5 KW startomatic on the Lister CSOG · Putting Lister CS Engines back to Work UK forum this has the contact timming sequence in it and if you become a member you can download it
Anyway good luck to any of you US buyers getting startomatics from the UK most of them I have come across have been quite worn and if you are thinking of buying a startomatic over here make sure its got all its boxes top box on generator and wallbox dont buy if they havent got these and even then ask for photos of inside the boxes if the contacts have burnt out they are a real bitch to get.
Anyway I am going to bed now I will post the engine number of the first engine that I siezed just in case I decide to sell it in the future. So people can avoid it like the plague if it comes on the market in the future.
Mick (real name)
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Oh I am so sorry to have offended the almighty
Insert Quote
I got my first 2.5KW Lister startomatic 5 years ago and had no documentation or experiance of these bits of kit.
Ah get over yourself, no documentation and no experience didn't stop you from vandalising one.
Some years ago a guy I knew paid a thousand pounds for an old 100watt class 4 laser, the idea was to cut metal, he had no documentation and no experience, I told him not to power it up, go find someone who knew something about them and order the books from the maker and don't look into laser with remaining eye.
Apparently about 4 hours later he threw brains and caution to the wind and started playing with it, we will never know what he did wrong, but he blew it up, literally, and had to pay SWEB about 500 quid to repair the mains supply to the row of cottages.
What else am I suposed to check if I have no knowledge of these particular engines
Oil I checked it
Water I filled the tank
Connected 2 batteries
Oh I guess that's it, and make sure you are wearing dark sunglasses and a fedora so you look cool too.
You obviously have an innate psychic ability and no need to perform routine checks and maintenance like us mere mortals.
It had been passed to me as a working bit of kit
and it sounds like it was, until you got hold of it
I didnt know about hand priming the oil system and I siezed the engine. I had never seen a generator like this before it looked more like a steam engine to me.
yeah, it was full of all these really wierd and strange things like poppet valves and bearing shells and lubricating oil and functioned on completely different principles to every other diesel.
I didnt have lots of clever people to advise me I had zero information about them It used to belong to a mate of mine and had been working reliably untill his death. His son lent it to me about 6 monthes after it had last run What more could I have checked
How do you tell if the pumps not working when the engines running?
You check the pump BEFORE you start the bloody engine, and when the engine is running you LISTEN, and when you take it off load you give it a minute or two for the temperatures to equalise before shutting down, etc etc etc
I posted my information so that other people might not make the same mistake as i made.
It is totaly gutting when you sieze your new generator. I actually needed a generator I live off grid. I have been running a startomatic everyday for the last 5 years 8 hours a day weekdays and 12 hours on weekends and they are most wonderfull bits of kit. which I have found very reliable.
5 years x 52 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours = 10400
5 years x 52 weeks x 2 days x 12 hours = 6240
10400 + 6240 = 16640 hours
A testament to their reliability even under abusive and neglect conditions
I know alot more about startomatics now and allways check the oil pump is working now I also test the mainbearings with a 4 foot prybar under the flywheels check the big end same method through the crankcase door
I'm sat here shaking my head in awe that anyone can actually be dumb enough to write stuff like that and expect to be taken seriously.
You are a mechanical vandal of the first order.
I also clean out the sump and fill with fresh HD 30 diesel oil. I havent made the same mistake again
No, it sounds like you have invented a whole slew of brand new and equally mind boggling practices.
Anyway 2 points to make
The genuine lister oil system is not failsafe.
well, it's not idiot proof, Lister never shipped a 4 foot crowbar or 16lb sledge as part of the official tool kit
Lister crankshafts break whether bolted to a concrete block or not.
see above
Point 1 It does not matter whether I am a vandel or not If the oil pump fails on a lister single cylinder CS engine it will sieze this is fact I have done it It cost me good and it hurt at the time. I am not bothered about mt ego I admit I am a dickhead and honestly admitted what I did. It takes bottle to admit you messed up but I did. What I dont like is statements like above which state opinions as if gospel.
Well the thing is it is not an opinion, it is fact and it is gospel.
Did it never occur to that thing that you use as a brain that there has to be a really good reason to put a lubricating oil pump and plumbing OUTSIDE an engine block instead of in the more suitable environment inside the block?
Did it never occur to you that with the oils of the day Lister expected it to sludge up now and again and interfere with the functioning of the oil pump, so they put it on the outside so 2 unions and 2 bolts and 60 seconds later the pump is in your hand so you can strip, clean and test in in 5 minutes and have it back on the engine ready for service.
Did it never occur to you that the shut down delay on start-o-matic sets after no load wasn't in case farmer turned another light on, but to equalise the temps inside the engine before shutting down?
Did it never occur to you that these engines clearly will run with no oil pump for some time, PROVIDED ALL OTHER THINGS ARE EQUAL AND ADEQUATELY MAINTAINED because they were designed that way with the splash lube system.
Do you think you are the first person ever to encounter a gummed up oil pump? Which can only happen with dirty oil or oil that has been left standing a long time?
Point 2 Crankshafts break. I only passed on the information because the engine had still been running generating electricity and only when it came to shut off time did it become apparant. I think this is amazing. The set was regluarly serviced and not in bad condition the crank just broke in service and it could have been running for 8 hours like that. The guy didnt know he just got another engine the next day. This was in excess of 5 years ago and his secondhand engine cost him 500 quid from his local generator dealer I personaly do not deduce anything from this just that cranks break whether bolted down to a concrefe block or not.
You deduce anything you like, cranks don't break in service without a reason, and that reason is negligence, pure and simple.
Doesn't it occur to you that an engine that can break a crank and still run (not as rare as you might think) has to be designed well enough so that transient loads are relatively low in normal service conditions? and if transient loads are realtively low, how can they break a crank?
christ on a crutch, you have got 16 thousand hours and you're taking a 4 foot crow bar to the mains and big ends...
I thought a forum was for civilised conversation not personal attacks all I am doing is sharing my personal expierance.
I am BEING civilized, if I saw you taking a 4 foot crow bar to big ends I'd snatch it out of your hands and beat you with it until you absorbed clue #1
I have been running these things for 5 years now and have learnt the hard way.
You haven't learned a damn thing, you are getting a free ride on the over-engineering of the Lister factory and sailing along as ignorant as ever and as vandalistic as ever
They have only become popular again recently
5 years ago there wasnt a wealth of information available and spares parts very expensive if vou could get them.
Rubbish
you're in a specialized forum, go outside of it and as time passes there are proportionally less and less people each year who know anything about them.
Now I have decent documentation and Indian spares.
But sadly no brain or mechanical aptitude
Thanks to the popularity of listeroids in the US this information is now abundant.2 years ago if you googled lister cs or startomatic you got very little information now there pages and pages. So thank you US cousins. You have done more to promote listers than we in the UK.
Funny how 5 years ago your mate just went to his local generator guy and bought a spare engine then innit.
Wonder how he managed that without the aid of google.
I am running a fully up and running 8/1 engined 4.5KW start o matic as I type this This has a totally functioning startomatic system which I use to start the set with I use this system because it charges the batteries as well. It has taken me years to get the startomatic working properly.
QED
The second one I got had melted the charging contacts in the control box and I managed to get another control box I connected that up and it vaporised the same contacts again.
That's because you're a numbnuts
Ive got the lister manual now and the contacts need setting up very carefully or else you blow up your contacts.
Funny, we always managed with a bit of paper from a fag packet, easier than setting the tappets
The reason I open myself up to abuse is that I dont want any of you US buyers to make the same mistake as I made.
Before you first start them up make sure the contacts operate in the correct fashion.
start-o-matics are rarer than rocking horse shit stateside, you may have noticed that is why everyone is buying chinese heads to go on their listerOIDS
there are also some pretty smart people in these forums who can read the s-o-m schematics and cobble together an electronic equivalent for less than it would cost to buy and ship over a set of s-o-m mechanical control boxes, and get a more electrically efficient system out of it to boot
there are also people who work with electrical switching every day or who ran points and coil ignition systems who know how to set up a relay.
There is a manual for the 4.5 KW startomatic on the Lister CSOG · Putting Lister CS Engines back to Work UK forum this has the contact timming sequence in it and if you become a member you can download it
pimp your ride
Anyway good luck to any of you US buyers getting startomatics from the UK most of them I have come across have been quite worn
oh the irony, frankie howerd where are you now
and if you are thinking of buying a startomatic over here make sure its got all its boxes top box on generator and wallbox dont buy if they havent got these
yeah, they contain all the magic juice without which the diesel and alternator are totally useless, the alternators are just there for show you know, you can't bypass the magic juice in the magic boxes and get power unless you are a high sith lord well versed in the arcane black arts
and even then ask for photos of inside the boxes if the contacts have burnt out they are a real bitch to get.
Probably because there are people like you around who don't realise that everything in said boxes are actually SERVICE items, eg you do not go out and buy new, you service them.
Anyway I am going to bed now I will post the engine number of the first engine that I siezed just in case I decide to sell it in the future. So people can avoid it like the plague if it comes on the market in the future.
Mick (real name)
No, ALL the engine and set numbers of EVERYTHING you have touched would be safer.
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Whoh... can anyone see the icecaps? I think I just read a previously unidentified source of global warming. Listeroil, live and learn eh, we weren't all raised by these things. Bill
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Binnie, there may not be that many people like Zig around but I’ll bet there is someone like him in the Montreal area. By nature people like Zig don’t have a high profile. People like him don’t have to advertise. That website was built by a friend or relative and I’ll bet he hasn’t even seen it in a year or more. If you need that kind of work I’m sure he’ll be happy to do it but you might want to look around locally the way I did. Antique car clubs, antique tractor organizations, fairs, probably more rural areas. When I went to the fair I had my piston and conrod in a backpack. I took some time to talk about their tractors first, not just to break the ice, their machines were fascinating and in some cases pieces of art. Few of them seemed to be “gentleman collectors” there were 20 or more lined up for the antique pull competition.
As far as the radiator is concerned its now in a slightly different configuration. I got it up there by putting a lag bolt through the wall header, attaching a pulley and towing it up there with my ATV. Before working near it I put safety straps to other hard points.
Thanks, Geno
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Who the hell do you think you are. Just a self opinionated typist you dont know what you are talking about. You claim to be an expert on all things lister. You only have a project engine which you are playing with. I run mine for power every day. I think you are full of bullshit. Ive been reading your posts with interest since I found this site and you purport to be an expert if you are so clever why dont you contribute to the UK lister forum we in the UK need as much info as possable most of the lister mechanics who worked on these machines are retired or dead. For your information the method of testing the mainbearing with a prybar was passed down to me by a time served lister engineer who serviced generators on dartmoor. The reason he said CS engined startomatics had gone out of favour was that they didnt produce enough power and spares were very expensive most people wanted more kilowatts. The guy I bought the startomatic from was not a mate. It was an advert in ad trader the spare engine was in the corner and looked like it had been there for years. I didnt say you could buy an engine for 500 quid 5 years ago you deduced that. It was probably nearer to 10 he was then running an air cooled twin 7kw startomatic and had been for a few years. The 4.5 was just his standby unit.He sold it because he had just got an inverter and battery setup and had power 24/7.
Anyway you are a nasty person to make personal attacks. Threats to hit me with a crow bar who do you think you are.I contribute to this forum not to blow my own trumpet you made this personal.
You write crap Nortons never had jampot suspension AJS and Matchless did. Fact
Where do you get 3/8 UNC treads on a lister. Answer nowhere all the threads on lister cs engines are either BSW or BSF so where do you get off on posting on this site that the threads on listers are UNC even the thread anglle is wrong so you are a vandle join the club. I seem to remember ypu singing the joys of using your dads old taps to clean the threads on your repared cylinder. Do you get off on passing false information.
And another I saw your pictures of your startomatic a while ago they are not there now Whats all that crap in your control cubicle Ive seen a few over the years and ive never seen one like yours I think you put some crap in it to make your pictures look good the kit in lister boxes is much more substantial. It dosnt look anything like the ones in the manual that you made available.
Also on your mig welding of the cylinder anyone could tack little bits of chicken shit all round a crack then grind it down with a grinderette and make it look nice. You say a time served welder looked at your job and said it was good How did he test it xray ultrasonic no he just looked. It cannot be a safe repair cast iron and steel do not weld together How many hours have you run your engine like this with a decent load on it. I bet you havent even done that.
The square bar on the valve lifter assembly is in the wrong position its should be on the top hole on the bell crank where the 2 spings fit. IF you are going to contribute get your facts correct
Mick
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Who the hell do you think you are. Just a self opinionated typist you dont know what you are talking about. You claim to be an expert on all things lister.
I know who I am, who the hell are you.
Who do you think I am? Mavis Beacon.
I never claimed to be an expert on all things lister, nor anything even remotely similar.
You only have a project engine which you are playing with. I run mine for power every day.
Listen bimbo, my grandad had a lister powering the farm, my dad apprenticed to farm industries in truro, so he visited most of the farms thereabouts and many of them ran on start-o-matic power, 20 some years later he bought one of the old sets he used to work on, so I grew up around em too, later on he was chief engineer for south east asia for a petro logistics outfit, apart from the fleet of 27 ships, 18 foden artics (gotta love those gardners) workshops, acres of drill pipe and other logistical supplies for the 15 rigs he was responsible for supply for, which btw included "big john" which was one of the biggest semi submersibles of the day, they ran about 40 CS series doing everything from pumping to compressors, I would have been about 6 when I started handing him spanners and shit, and routinely running our s-o-m from the age of 12, had to use a tick tock to lift the bloody heads off, and again counting flats to torque em down.
NOWADAYS I have one sat in the garden that I am indeed playing with, cos I have mains electric and gas and other things to do with my time.
NOWADAYS there are a lot of things I don't happen to do much, doesn't mean I never did them.
I think you are full of bullshit.
I don't care what you, or anyone else thinks.
I _know_ who and what I am, what I have done, what I know, I don't have dick to prove to you.
Ive been reading your posts with interest since I found this site and you purport to be an expert
in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
most of these guys have never seen a genuine CS, only clones, none of them grew up around them, not all of them are time served.
like I said before, i never claimed to be an expert, but I have been around them for most of my life.
if you are so clever why dont you contribute to the UK lister forum we in the UK need as much info as possable most of the lister mechanics who worked on these machines are retired or dead.
1/ this place was going first
2/ why should I
3/ I could drive up the road and say hi face to face with four dursley guys tomorrow, guys retiring now were 30 and could have had 15 years at dursley before the cs series was axed, so maybe they are just avoiding you.
For your information the method of testing the mainbearing with a prybar was passed down to me by a time served lister engineer who serviced generators on dartmoor.
Bullshit, no time served engineer will use a 4 foot crowbar on an engine internals, ever, ever, ever.
#1 babbit is soft, you'll fuck it up.
#2 cast iron is brittle, you'll likely chip it
#3 BDC, which is the only place a 4 foot crowbar can exert any leverage without simply rotating the crank isn't going to tell you dick about bearing wear anyway
#4 I could go on, but it would all be "whooosh"
The reason he said CS engined startomatics had gone out of favour was that they didnt produce enough power and spares were very expensive most people wanted more kilowatts.
Bullshit
They produced enough power for anyone who didn't need more power, and lo and behold the sub 5 KVA gen set market is more active than it ever was.
Spares were listed in the book, along with prices, and they were actually pretty cheap. Especially as they were rarely needed. A fucking car battery was half a weeks wages back then, so stop using todays economics to try and justify something that just wasnt so back then.
The guy I bought the startomatic from was not a mate. It was an advert in ad trader the spare engine was in the corner and looked like it had been there for years. I didnt say you could buy an engine for 500 quid 5 years ago you deduced that. It was probably nearer to 10 he was then running an air cooled twin 7kw startomatic and had been for a few years. The 4.5 was just his standby unit.He sold it because he had just got an inverter and battery setup and had power 24/7.
You could buy a CS engine for 50 quid 5 years ago, dad lent our old set to a mate and told him to keep it rather than haul it back, I sold one in 1985 for a leather jacket with fringes, a couple of pints of beer, and the thing I really wanted in trade, a b44 that had seen better days
in february this year I paid 300 quid for a complete 100% working and functional with negligible wear s-o-m
Anyway you are a nasty person to make personal attacks. Threats to hit me with a crow bar who do you think you are.I contribute to this forum not to blow my own trumpet you made this personal.
I laughed at an engineer when I was an apprentice because he made a stupid mistake, I got a fist in the face, because I saw the mistake and didn't tell him, and because I wasn't fit to laugh at him.
If you picked up the wrong tool to do a job, or used a tool inappropriately, it was snatched out of your hands and flung at you.
You never ever ever repeated the mistake, or lazy attitude.
You deserve to be beaten with your crowbar, not because it is mechanical vandalism of the first order, though it is and that is justification enough in my book, but because the pain you feel will open your eyes to the fact that using such an inappropriate tool in such a dreadful way is going to damage the work, and damaged work can go wrong in unpredictable and nasty ways, and injure or kill anyone unfortunate to be nearby at the time.
that is called criminal negligence
You write crap Nortons never had jampot suspension AJS and Matchless did. Fact
Norton ES2 was often referred to as jampot, btw dr john, _the_ norton single specialist, who lives up the road from me, who I have bought bike from in the past, who builds bikes for sheene amongst others, is the one you need to argue this point with.
BSA never made a model called the "Stinkwheel" either, but you can just as easily and accurately say that back in the day the same term was used for ducati (cucciolo) and vincent (firefly) but no doubt some arse will come out of the wood work to tell you you are talking shite.
BTW I bought my jampot norton from the late stan thomas of relubbus, ex isle of man fame, he called it a jampot norton too, I guess he was wrong as well
Where do you get 3/8 UNC treads on a lister. Answer nowhere all the threads on lister cs engines are either BSW or BSF so where do you get off on posting on this site that the threads on listers are UNC even the thread anglle is wrong so you are a vandle join the club. I seem to remember ypu singing the joys of using your dads old taps to clean the threads on your repared cylinder. Do you get off on passing false information.
1/ apart from the 1/2", BSW and UNC are the same TPI, one is 55 degrees and one is 60 degrees, but they will "fit", though hex and spanner sizes are not equivalent.
2/ I have full sets of taps and dies for BSW, BSF, BA Cycle UNC UNF BSP BSPT etc etc, you get the picture, why would I pick up and use the wrong one?
3/ The listers that were ordered for south east asia came with metric threads mainly, and some JIC for the ancilliaries, lister were like that, they'd build what you ordered.
4/ if as you say all the threads on a lister are BSF or BSW, who fitted all the BSP?
5/ if you read that I used a 3/8" UNC tap on my lister, you must also have read where I used it, on the barrel to hold the brackets I made up for the Dennis radiator, and they are UNC, not BSW.
6/ Any other arguments you want to pick about my set that you think you know more about it than me?
And another I saw your pictures of your startomatic a while ago they are not there now Whats all that crap in your control cubicle Ive seen a few over the years and ive never seen one like yours I think you put some crap in it to make your pictures look good the kit in lister boxes is much more substantial. It dosnt look anything like the ones in the manual that you made available.
Yes that's right, I went to old electrical boot sales and cobbled together soem heath robinson crap and took pictures of it and claimed it was the insides of my boxes.
much easier than simply taking pictures of the insides of the boxes of my 100% working and original s-o-m
I you had a clue you would realise that the rare thing to happen with s-o-m sets is to put two side by side and find them to be identical...... andy on here bought one, different alternator to mine, no control boxes but different alternator ergo different boxes, my mate bought one, another different alternator and another set of different boxes, binnie has just bought one, yet another different alternator and different set of control boxes, thats four bought this year I know of, and no two the same.
see that thing I said above bout anything else about my set you were going to tell me I'm wrong about
see that other thing I said above about listers essentially running a bespoke production line on the cs series
Also on your mig welding of the cylinder anyone could tack little bits of chicken shit all round a crack then grind it down with a grinderette and make it look nice.
Yes, they probably could, or I could use blu tac and simply photoshop the picture and convince everyone I'm the next I K Brunel
You say a time served welder looked at your job and said it was good How did he test it xray ultrasonic no he just looked.
no, I said a CODED welder, devonport docks, nuke powerplant rated, amazingly competent welder, and yeah, he looked, and touched and so on, no machines, just an experienced eye
of course he could be wrong and you who have only seen a picture on a web page could be right, I used rhode island red shit
It cannot be a safe repair cast iron and steel do not weld together
Clearly, you are again correct, if the scram rods fail to engage properly and the core overheats and pressures within the containment vessel peak we could be looking at another chernobyl, on the other hand seeing as it is a unpressurised thermal syphon water jacket on a 6 BHP diesel that is never going to dissipate more than 1500 watts into said water jacket, and given that water + ferrous metals = rust which is several times larger than the primary compound, which is why leaky pipe threads rust tight, and given that it didn't leak a drop or blow a bubble with 15 psi of air and soapy water we might just avoid a china syndrome
How many hours have you run your engine like this with a decent load on it. I bet you havent even done that.
Bugger all, it did about 4 hours at 3 kw
Again you are probably right, when doungeness trips out and the grid dumps that extra few hundred megawatts on the lister it might just fail
The square bar on the valve lifter assembly is in the wrong position its should be on the top hole on the bell crank where the 2 spings fit.
Next time I speak to bob bell (he is somewhere near the top of engineering nowadays at listers) I'll be sure to point out to him that they built my engine wrong, maybe he will issue a recall of all s-o-m sets and make them all identical to the one you have.
IF you are going to contribute get your facts correct
Mick
why, it doesn't seem to bother you.
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Hi Guy
Did it never occur to you that the shut down delay on start-o-matic sets after no load wasn't in case farmer turned another light on, but to equalise the temps inside the engine before shutting down?
Here again you show your ignorance. What delay on shut down. You disconnect load and the fuel control solonoid releases under spring pressure closes the rack and inserts the decompressor. The set takes about 1 min to run down and is left in a decompressed postion ready to start next time. Is this enough time to equalise the temperature in the engine? A pure figment of your imagination there is no shut down delay.
start-o-matics are rarer than rocking horse shit stateside, you may have noticed that is why everyone is buying chinese heads to go on their listerOIDS
there are also some pretty smart people in these forums who can read the s-o-m schematics and cobble together an electronic equivalent for less than it would cost to buy and ship over a set of s-o-m mechanical control boxes, and get a more electrically efficient system out of it to boot
You miss the point again. I dont suggest that people buy startomatic boxes from here to convert thier listeroids. What I said was if you are buying a startomatic in the UK make sure you get it with all the bits. Whats wrong with that? Ask Andy what he would prefer.
US purchasers of UK startomatics want to get the best bit of kit they can. Why would they buy a lister in the UK and then cobble together a modern equivalent, when they could get one with all the correct original bits If they ask the correct questions.
Also what point is there in having a more electrically efficient startomatic system. Its a generator and the original system only takes about 10 watts to operate it. Why bother about better efficiency its only 10 watts on a 2500 + watt generator who cares.
I you had a clue you would realise that the rare thing to happen with s-o-m sets is to put two side by side and find them to be identical...... andy on here bought one, different alternator to mine, no control boxes but different alternator ergo different boxes, my mate bought one, another different alternator and another set of different boxes, binnie has just bought one, yet another different alternator and different set of control boxes, thats four bought this year I know of, and no two the same.
I was talking about your bullshit control box not other peoples. But if you want to go there.
Andys generator a 1954 somac with a type N alternator no top box or startomatic box
Binnies generator is a October 1940 war time generator and a lot earlier design
Your Mates I cannot coment on You give no details year, alternator type,or power output 2.5kw 3.0kw or 4.5kw?
My first 2.5 kw SOMAC 1951 with a type K alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
My second 2.5 kw SOMAC 1956 with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
Your generator is a 1956 SOMAC with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
Andys alternator IS a N type the same as yours. My second SOMAC same year as yours same N type alternator all of these machines are of a similar age and operate on the same control gear.
My 1956 2.5kw startomatic box has got the same internal componants as the pictures in the 1952 startomatic manual which you offered to this group also the 1951 unit has got the startomatic box with the same componants. Yours look nothing like mine or the ones in your manual or any of the other same style cast ali boxes that Ive had the pleasure examining. Please post pictures of the inside of your control cubical again I noticed they wernt there when I went for a look. Binnies generator was produced in 1940 during the war the control gear on his set is of an older design and not really relavent to this type of cast ali box.
In 1958 lister introduced the 8/1 engined 4.5kw startomatic and the 6/1 engined 3kw startomatic Both these machines use the steel control cubical and this is the same one that was used untill the end of production.
More soon Mick
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Hi Guy
Did it never occur to you that the shut down delay on start-o-matic sets after no load wasn't in case farmer turned another light on, but to equalise the temps inside the engine before shutting down?
Here again you show your ignorance. What delay on shut down. You disconnect load and the fuel control solonoid releases under spring pressure closes the rack and inserts the decompressor. The set takes about 1 min to run down and is left in a decompressed postion ready to start next time. Is this enough time to equalise the temperature in the engine? A pure figment of your imagination there is no shut down delay.
Yeah whatever, you're right and I'm wrong, and since I never made up, invented or discovered any of my knowledge, that means that everything I learned from everyone else is also wrong, it also means that everyone who can read an electromechanical schematic and clearly see the delay line built into the original lister design is also clearly wrong.
Remind us of your electrical or mechanical engineering qualifications and experience again.
I seem to have inadvertently confused you with an idiot who uses 4 foot crow bars on internal components.
start-o-matics are rarer than rocking horse shit stateside, you may have noticed that is why everyone is buying chinese heads to go on their listerOIDS
there are also some pretty smart people in these forums who can read the s-o-m schematics and cobble together an electronic equivalent for less than it would cost to buy and ship over a set of s-o-m mechanical control boxes, and get a more electrically efficient system out of it to boot
You miss the point again. I dont suggest that people buy startomatic boxes from here to convert thier listeroids. What I said was if you are buying a startomatic in the UK make sure you get it with all the bits. Whats wrong with that? Ask Andy what he would prefer.
US purchasers of UK startomatics want to get the best bit of kit they can. Why would they buy a lister in the UK and then cobble together a modern equivalent, when they could get one with all the correct original bits If they ask the correct questions.
Also what point is there in having a more electrically efficient startomatic system. Its a generator and the original system only takes about 10 watts to operate it. Why bother about better efficiency its only 10 watts on a 2500 + watt generator who cares.
If it only takes ten watts to operate it, how come they are always warm to the touch, like there is at least 1 to 200 watts being dissipated inside?
How is it that MOSFET technology with sub microsecond rise times is suddenly outperformed not merely in overall efficiency, but also in switching speed and accuracy, so that the old electromechanical control system not only consumed less power but caused the alternator to generate more efficiently too?
This is really intriguing, because I have seen (not s-o-m admittedly) old gen sets with electro mechanical controls systems have them replaced by modern electronics and the gen head temperarure has dropped by several degrees, which, naievely, I assumed was because the electronics was switching faster and more accurately than the electromechanical controls and generating less waste heat in the head.... but then I'm not a sparky, you obviously are, par excellence.
I you had a clue you would realise that the rare thing to happen with s-o-m sets is to put two side by side and find them to be identical...... andy on here bought one, different alternator to mine, no control boxes but different alternator ergo different boxes, my mate bought one, another different alternator and another set of different boxes, binnie has just bought one, yet another different alternator and different set of control boxes, thats four bought this year I know of, and no two the same.
I was talking about your bullshit control box not other peoples. But if you want to go there.
Andys generator a 1954 somac with a type N alternator no top box or startomatic box
Binnies generator is a October 1940 war time generator and a lot earlier design
Your Mates I cannot coment on You give no details year, alternator type,or power output 2.5kw 3.0kw or 4.5kw?
My first 2.5 kw SOMAC 1951 with a type K alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
My second 2.5 kw SOMAC 1956 with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
Your generator is a 1956 SOMAC with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
I can't speak for your two sets, I ain't seen em, andys alternator and mine are completely and utterly different, or rather they are as similar as a 1960's ford cortina and a 1980's ford cortina, which is to say not even remotely similar unless you are a doofus who knows next to nothing about them, but has owned and driven a few of them.
Andys alternator IS a N type the same as yours. My second SOMAC same year as yours same N type alternator all of these machines are of a similar age and operate on the same control gear.
My 1956 2.5kw startomatic box has got the same internal componants as the pictures in the 1952 startomatic manual which you offered to this group also the 1951 unit has got the startomatic box with the same componants. Yours look nothing like mine or the ones in your manual or any of the other same style cast ali boxes that Ive had the pleasure examining. Please post pictures of the inside of your control cubical again I noticed they wernt there when I went for a look. Binnies generator was produced in 1940 during the war the control gear on his set is of an older design and not really relavent to this type of cast ali box.
In 1958 lister introduced the 8/1 engined 4.5kw startomatic and the 6/1 engined 3kw startomatic Both these machines use the steel control cubical and this is the same one that was used untill the end of production.
More soon Mick
like I said, don't tell me, tell bob bell, he's current head of engineering at listers, I'm sure he'd appreciate your expert input.
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Some years ago I took a job lecturing in engineering at a local college, the head of the department of engineering didn't recognise me so didn't realise that he used to buy cars from my uncle and used to bring his MG midget which he himself could never keep on the road or in tune to the workshop for regular fixing of things that had been done wrong.
So he never realised that I knew he used to run a tool hire shop, no doubt he was mustard at chainsaws and lawnmowers, but that ain't engineering.
So one day he is taking the piss out of the class dummy, who wasn't actually dumb, just a farmers son who grew up using machinery, and dummy farm boy asks a question about 2 stroke diesels.
head of engineering department brays with laughter, and says there is no such thing, entire class joins in, laughing at dummy farm boy.
I'd already had run ins with this asshole, over a girl who he ignored cos she was a girl, so he had her sat on the bench ( a no-no in itself) while we played best friends with the cool lads in the class, yet the girl was the first one to grasp anodic protection in galvanic corrosion in one of my classes, while the boys could just about grasp how to put spoilers and big speakers in their ricers, but she had tits so she had no place in an engineering course eh...
anyway, I wait for laughter to die down and suggest head of department calls general motors and puts them on the speakerphone for all the class to hear, I'll pay for the call.
why would I want to do that, he asks
well you wouldn't really, I say, because general motors have been making, amongs other things, detroit diesels, since before he was born, they were reknowned in wartime for being noisy, so noisy they were useless in things like sherman tanks because the germans could hear them coming from miles away, no element of surprise, and one of the reasons they were noisy was because they were two stroke diesels.
he starts huffing a puffing
I go on to tell him when he has finished that call he can take the class down to the railway station a mile away, where the whole class can watch and lister to non existent two stroke diesels in the form of rootes-lister DMUs and full size deltics running up and down the tracks.
the class is sat there, mouths agape
the reason I got sacked was because I then pointed at farm dummy and said " and YOU think HE is the stupid one, he is already more of an engineer than you will ever be."
I guess I should have kept my mouth shut and taken the 27 quid an hour I was being paid, and let the system continue to destroy classfulls of engineering students at a time.
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Hi Guy
Did it never occur to you that the shut down delay on start-o-matic sets after no load wasn't in case farmer turned another light on, but to equalise the temps inside the engine before shutting down?
Here again you show your ignorance. What delay on shut down. You disconnect load and the fuel control solonoid releases under spring pressure closes the rack and inserts the decompressor. The set takes about 1 min to run down and is left in a decompressed postion ready to start next time. Is this enough time to equalise the temperature in the engine? A pure figment of your imagination there is no shut down delay.
Yeah whatever, you're right and I'm wrong, and since I never made up, invented or discovered any of my knowledge, that means that everything I learned from everyone else is also wrong, it also means that everyone who can read an electromechanical schematic and clearly see the delay line built into the original lister design is also clearly wrong.
Remind us of your electrical or mechanical engineering qualifications and experience again.
I seem to have inadvertently confused you with an idiot who uses 4 foot crow bars on internal components.
start-o-matics are rarer than rocking horse shit stateside, you may have noticed that is why everyone is buying chinese heads to go on their listerOIDS
there are also some pretty smart people in these forums who can read the s-o-m schematics and cobble together an electronic equivalent for less than it would cost to buy and ship over a set of s-o-m mechanical control boxes, and get a more electrically efficient system out of it to boot
You miss the point again. I dont suggest that people buy startomatic boxes from here to convert thier listeroids. What I said was if you are buying a startomatic in the UK make sure you get it with all the bits. Whats wrong with that? Ask Andy what he would prefer.
US purchasers of UK startomatics want to get the best bit of kit they can. Why would they buy a lister in the UK and then cobble together a modern equivalent, when they could get one with all the correct original bits If they ask the correct questions.
Also what point is there in having a more electrically efficient startomatic system. Its a generator and the original system only takes about 10 watts to operate it. Why bother about better efficiency its only 10 watts on a 2500 + watt generator who cares.
If it only takes ten watts to operate it, how come they are always warm to the touch, like there is at least 1 to 200 watts being dissipated inside?
How is it that MOSFET technology with sub microsecond rise times is suddenly outperformed not merely in overall efficiency, but also in switching speed and accuracy, so that the old electromechanical control system not only consumed less power but caused the alternator to generate more efficiently too?
This is really intriguing, because I have seen (not s-o-m admittedly) old gen sets with electro mechanical controls systems have them replaced by modern electronics and the gen head temperarure has dropped by several degrees, which, naievely, I assumed was because the electronics was switching faster and more accurately than the electromechanical controls and generating less waste heat in the head.... but then I'm not a sparky, you obviously are, par excellence.
I you had a clue you would realise that the rare thing to happen with s-o-m sets is to put two side by side and find them to be identical...... andy on here bought one, different alternator to mine, no control boxes but different alternator ergo different boxes, my mate bought one, another different alternator and another set of different boxes, binnie has just bought one, yet another different alternator and different set of control boxes, thats four bought this year I know of, and no two the same.
I was talking about your bullshit control box not other peoples. But if you want to go there.
Andys generator a 1954 somac with a type N alternator no top box or startomatic box
Binnies generator is a October 1940 war time generator and a lot earlier design
Your Mates I cannot coment on You give no details year, alternator type,or power output 2.5kw 3.0kw or 4.5kw?
My first 2.5 kw SOMAC 1951 with a type K alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
My second 2.5 kw SOMAC 1956 with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
Your generator is a 1956 SOMAC with a type N alternator plus cast aluminium startomatic box
I can't speak for your two sets, I ain't seen em, andys alternator and mine are completely and utterly different, or rather they are as similar as a 1960's ford cortina and a 1980's ford cortina, which is to say not even remotely similar unless you are a doofus who knows next to nothing about them, but has owned and driven a few of them.
Andys alternator IS a N type the same as yours. My second SOMAC same year as yours same N type alternator all of these machines are of a similar age and operate on the same control gear.
My 1956 2.5kw startomatic box has got the same internal componants as the pictures in the 1952 startomatic manual which you offered to this group also the 1951 unit has got the startomatic box with the same componants. Yours look nothing like mine or the ones in your manual or any of the other same style cast ali boxes that Ive had the pleasure examining. Please post pictures of the inside of your control cubical again I noticed they wernt there when I went for a look. Binnies generator was produced in 1940 during the war the control gear on his set is of an older design and not really relavent to this type of cast ali box.
In 1958 lister introduced the 8/1 engined 4.5kw startomatic and the 6/1 engined 3kw startomatic Both these machines use the steel control cubical and this is the same one that was used untill the end of production.
More soon Mick
like I said, don't tell me, tell bob bell, he's current head of engineering at listers, I'm sure he'd appreciate your expert input.
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Some years ago I took a job lecturing in engineering at a local college, the head of the department of engineering didn't recognise me so didn't realise that he used to buy cars from my uncle and used to bring his MG midget which he himself could never keep on the road or in tune to the workshop for regular fixing of things that had been done wrong.
So he never realised that I knew he used to run a tool hire shop, no doubt he was mustard at chainsaws and lawnmowers, but that ain't engineering.
So one day he is taking the piss out of the class dummy, who wasn't actually dumb, just a farmers son who grew up using machinery, and dummy farm boy asks a question about 2 stroke diesels.
head of engineering department brays with laughter, and says there is no such thing, entire class joins in, laughing at dummy farm boy.
I'd already had run ins with this asshole, over a girl who he ignored cos she was a girl, so he had her sat on the bench ( a no-no in itself) while we played best friends with the cool lads in the class, yet the girl was the first one to grasp anodic protection in galvanic corrosion in one of my classes, while the boys could just about grasp how to put spoilers and big speakers in their ricers, but she had tits so she had no place in an engineering course eh...
anyway, I wait for laughter to die down and suggest head of department calls general motors and puts them on the speakerphone for all the class to hear, I'll pay for the call.
why would I want to do that, he asks
well you wouldn't really, I say, because general motors have been making, amongs other things, detroit diesels, since before he was born, they were reknowned in wartime for being noisy, so noisy they were useless in things like sherman tanks because the germans could hear them coming from miles away, no element of surprise, and one of the reasons they were noisy was because they were two stroke diesels.
he starts huffing a puffing
I go on to tell him when he has finished that call he can take the class down to the railway station a mile away, where the whole class can watch and lister to non existent two stroke diesels in the form of rootes-lister DMUs and full size deltics running up and down the tracks.
the class is sat there, mouths agape
the reason I got sacked was because I then pointed at farm dummy and said " and YOU think HE is the stupid one, he is already more of an engineer than you will ever be."
I guess I should have kept my mouth shut and taken the 27 quid an hour I was being paid, and let the system continue to destroy classfulls of engineering students at a time.
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Guy
Yeah whatever, you're right and I'm wrong, and since I never made up, invented or discovered any of my knowledge, that means that everything I learned from everyone else is also wrong, it also means that everyone who can read an electromechanical schematic and clearly see the delay line built into the original lister design is also clearly wrong.
Show me where? in the SOM schematic where the delay circuit is to stop the engine from stopping untill temperatures have equalised as you stated.
The only delay on a SOM is the thermal trip which operates if the starting circiut is on for too long. This is because if you run out of fuel whilst running the set slows down and starts motoring itself round so the thermal delay trips the set out. It also has the same effect on starting if the set takes more than 45 seconds to start the thermal delay trips out and wont start again untill you manualy reset the trip. THERE IS NO DELAY ON SHUTDOWN I suggest you read and learn the schematic before you drop yourself deeper into the hole you are creating. If you dig a hole for someone to fall into watch out you dont fall in it yourself.
Also what the point is there in having a more electrically efficient startomatic system. Its a generator and the original system only takes about 10 watts to operate it. Why bother about better efficiency its only 10 watts on a 2500 + watt generator who cares.
If it only takes ten watts to operate it, how come they are always warm to the touch, like there is at least 1 to 200 watts being dissipated inside?
How is it that MOSFET technology with sub microsecond rise times is suddenly outperformed not merely in overall efficiency, but also in switching speed and accuracy, so that the old electromechanical control system not only consumed less power but caused the alternator to generate more efficiently too?
This is really intriguing, because I have seen (not s-o-m admittedly) old gen sets with electro mechanical controls systems have them replaced by modern electronics and the gen head temperarure has dropped by several degrees, which, naievely, I assumed was because the electronics was switching faster and more accurately than the electromechanical controls and generating less waste heat in the head.... but then I'm not a sparky, you obviously are, par excellence.
Again you miss the point
I talking about the power cunsumed by the SOMAC system not the power required to energise the field windings and charge the batteries. The heat produced in the top box or the control cubicle depending on what model is from the field winding resistor and the charge control resistor. I have no doubt these could be replaced with modern componants But nothing beats the rugged simplicity of 2 big fat resistors. Who wants transistors circuit boards multiple things to go wrong. When you can have a big fat wirewound resistor that you can rewind if it burns out.
Clearly, you are again correct, if the scram rods fail to engage properly and the core overheats and pressures within the containment vessel peak we could be looking at another chernobyl, on the other hand seeing as it is a unpressurised thermal syphon water jacket on a 6 BHP diesel that is never going to dissipate more than 1500 watts into said water jacket, and given that water + ferrous metals = rust which is several times larger than the primary compound, which is why leaky pipe threads rust tight, and given that it didn't leak a drop or blow a bubble with 15 psi of air and soapy water we might just avoid a china syndrome
You might have the pleasure of having a nuclear power station pluged into your arse.
My lister is my power station and if the containment vessel fails the power station goes into melt down. I supply power for myself and 5 other light users 7 days a week and it is a big deal for me and I would not trust your repair. However if you made a metal plate larger than your repair area you could stick it on the side of the block with some bathroom silicone sealer and tie it on with baling twine this I would be happy with as if your repair failed the silicone would hold it all in place.
Bugger all, it did about 4 hours at 3 kw
I wouldnt dream of running such a harsh test on a 60 year old 2.5kw startomatic head. This is vandelism of the first degree 3kw for 4 hours thats 20 percent overload I hope you dont suggest anybody else test there 60 year old alternators like that.
Did it never occur to you that these engines clearly will run with no oil pump for some time, PROVIDED ALL OTHER THINGS ARE EQUAL AND ADEQUATELY MAINTAINED because they were designed that way with the splash lube system.
Try and understand this brainless. If the oil pump fails for whatever reason no oil will get into the trough under the crankshaft when the dipper throws out all the oil and it is not replenished there is nothing to provide lubrication to anything all the oil ends up in the sump which is lower than the crankshaft trough. A splash lube system only works if theres any oil for it to splash in do you understand this. Like I said mine ran for 6 hours and it was locked solid the next day Maybe the Indian crankcase design is better than listers because it only has one sump and the TRB engines run without oil pumps
Mick