I can't help but laugh when I looked at your coked up piston head.. not at the carbon, that was impressive but the fact that your photo hosting site asked me if I wanted to make a calendar or greeting cards with the picture.  How cute would that be.. Merry Christmas from my carboned up piston

If your generator is too lightly loaded to avoid sending unburned fuel down the exhaust stack (which would smell and smoke) perhaps you can give it more work to do?  somehow have a dump circuit that goes to a big storage tank for hot water and turns on those heating elements.  You need hot water right?

I suspect when the engine isn't working hard it won't matter how you treat the after products.  My VW (older version not subject to recall) smells worse when the engine is idling than it does when everything is hot.  I have replaced the cat on mine but not because it plugged up because the weld cracked around it (known issue with the OEM pipe/cat)  As I recall the cat wasn't all that expensive and mine is pre-regen and pre-def type technologies.

Good luck!

Robert

It's a neat feeling isn't it!

My foray into backup power was a 3600 Watt Trace inverter and 4 golf cart batteries I got off a guy 20 miles up the coast.  Got a good deal and he threw the batteries in for nothing (he'd never have shipped them).

I played with it for a bit and worked out a place for it to live and got another set of 4 Trojan T-125's for it (spent more on those than the inverter) and Hurricane Irene showed up and knocked out power for 3 1/2 days.  I ran on the first set of batteries (fridge, freezer, some lights, TV, etc) and that ran out in around a day.  The second (new) set lasted 2 days and at which point the house got quiet again.  I basically said to the family "don't open the fridge and hope the power comes back on soon" and in about 6 hours it did, so we didn't lose any food.

That started me on my way towards getting a generator too, at first I looked into Listeroids which is why I frequent this fine site, but eventually I decided on an Onan single cylinder 3000w watercooled Diesel (MDJA) and bought that for $200.  It was a sad state of affairs but I took it apart and cleaned it all up, etched it and sanded and primed and painted.  Replaced the injector pump which I got from a guy on the Onan group over at smokestak (good folks there much like the people here, very helpful).  It took me a few months and a lot of garage space to finish the restoration.

I did get the "when are you going to get rid of that thing"   (not) "It's smelly"  (so?)  "we never lose power" (yet)  "what are those batteries for? (what happens when they run out)  "I might back my car into it"   (I wouldn't recommend it, you will smash your car up and won't hurt the generator"  so it lived on a dolly between the two car spaces in the garage...

Then Hurricane Sandy hit!   after the initial storm hit, the power went off and we went dark (around 7pm at night if I recall)  I got the house going on the inverter (had replaced the original battery set by then) and since I have an oil fired hot water heater we could put the kids in the shower etc.  Next morning I got up (still no power)  got the generator out of the garage and fired it up.  While it was warming up I pulled the cord to the house and plugged the inverter into it so now the little Onan was running the house AND recharging the batteries.  Brewed up some coffee and then had my nice hot shower.  I don't care how rough you're living if you can start your day off with a hot coffee and a nice hot shower, you're not doing too bad.

This went on for a week (we were out of power for 6 1/2 days) and that little Onan never skipped a beat.  I ran it out of fuel once and a safety oil pressure sense line fatigued off and that dropped the decomp solenoid.  Both of those were easy fixes.  I ran a cord to my neighbor the first day to chill his fridge down but said long term he probably ought to take his stuff to his brother in law who still had power. 

Once the power came back on and life was good we were at the in-laws and my wife's sister lamented on how bad things were in Jersey and they had no power for 7 days and had to bug out to my inlaws beachfront condo.  "what did you guys do?"    and my wife said "oh we were fine, we ran our generator and didn't lose anything, still had hot showers and TV (dish network).   I gave her a funny look and said "Oh it's OUR generator now??? that stinky thing you wanted me to get rid of is OUR generator???"   vindication indeed!

I don't get the entitlement of the other neighbor though, that's damned rude if you ask me.  There's nothing fair or not about having some forethought to set yourself up with alternate power.

Robert

Missing pushrods and rockers the valves (if they are present) should be closed.  They may be rusted but hopefully have kept water out of the bore.  Either way it will be an interesting project for you!

What are you going to do about the frost damage? Try and source another block or scrape the patch off and do some Guy Fawksian welding on the cast and grind and smooth to finish?

Nice find on the SOM, she will dress up nicely I'm sure.  The wiring did look a bit sketchy so it will be a good idea to replace that with new.

Can't wait to see the finished results.

That's a lovely bit of kit you've made there Peter, the only thing missing now is some sort of kettle attachment to brew up a nice cup of tea with all that hot water you've got stored!

perhaps you you can find some screw down feet for it something beefy with Acme square threads that you can steady the whole works and get it off the wheels a bit.

Regards

Robert

Thanks RCA, I appreciate the info.  Hope all is going well with you up there!

Best wishes

RC

Wow, that really sucks...

Reminds me of a tranny shop in Richardson Texas that my friend took his cutlass to back when we were in high school.

The cars tranny had been through some hell I think and occasionally it would make this awful grinding sound, then a thunk then quiet for a while.  I drove to the place with him (so I could drive him home) and the guy said to check back in a couple of days.  This was back when cell phones were the size of bricks and cost thousands of $$.

Come back in a couple of days and he said it's fixed!  so my buddy went to pay him and then he drove home with me following.  When he got home he told me, it's still making noise!  so we drove back over and I sat in the back while we had the service manager sit in the passenger seat so we should show him.  We drove along for a bit and all was well and he said "sounds great to me" then a little while later we started to hear the slight grinding whirring noise, "Ah, that's the noise!" he said "Ah yes, thats the sound the planetary gears make when they go around the sun gear thats quite normal"  Now I didn't know enough to call bullship on that but eventually  kerbang then quiet again  so I pipe up "and that's normal too is it? what's that the sun doing a big bang?"   he looked at my buddy and said "Leave it with us".  The next time we picked the car up it was quiet and he never had any more trouble with the tranny for as long as he owned it.

Sounds like the same place to me! haha

Good luck

RC