i am doing my level best to keep my cool, but my patience is being tested
but that is ok, it has been tested before and it will likely be tested many more times before i croak.
i am really tired of the original lister being put on a pedestal as being the most fantastic of all man's creation.
it is no ferrari, it is no rolex, it is no manhattan project of internal combustion engines.
what it is, is a successful design that had a long production run, yes it was a mass produced engine and as
such had short cuts taken with it as well, anyone that doubts this is clearly lieing to themselves.
last week on this very board a member posted a picture of the assembly line at lister, showing a bellbottom dude
assembling his part of the engine.
if you look closely you will clearly see the crankshafts have been installed, but nowhere in the picture are the flywheels in view.
any finely balanced engine has to have its flywheels balanced along with the rest of the rotating assembly, such as crankshaft, rod, piston, rings, brgs etc.
anyone that has had the components of his engine balanced by a reputable shop will know that if you replace any part of the rotating assembly the whole thing has to be done again.
also there are reports from folks starting their engine on the crate and having it sit there and purr away, obviously pretty well balanced either by design or accident. and also reports of the engine started on a pallet, trying to jump all over the place and scaring the crap out of the poor guy that got in a hurry to start it,, obviously a poorly balanced engine.
if it will run on a pallet then it will run on resilient mounts, period. Conversely if it jumps all over the shop, then bolting it to concrete is not the solution but a bandaid fix. you can argue theory and math all day, but this is fact.
these engine just like every other production engine of mass production were balanced as well as need be, at a cost.
clearly when you do so there will be a few that fall outside good balance and also a few that are exceptionally balanced.
the ones in the middle are adequately balanced to mount to a concrete block and run forever, even the ones that fell outside the range of acceptable probably ran forever also anchored to concrete.
why did they specify a concrete base, pretty damned apparent to me, and should be apparent to anyone with a reasonable intellect.
also when these engines were first designed and put into place, the normal way to mount them was on a concrete block, didnt make a difference who's engine it was, most everyone mounted to concrete as it was cheap and easy to put in place.
they followed a hundred years of stationary engines being mounted that way, was accepted by the buying public as normal, so why reinvent the wheel.
one should also accept the fact that it was not at all common for end users to have at their disposal arc, mig, tig or other methods of welding up a framework, and while there were rubber mounts they were not as numerous or widely available.
going back to the balance issue, if the original engine was a rolex, and finely crafted and finely balanced, then the flywheels would not be interchangable, and one would not be able to just order up replacements.
in closing,,, the original engine was a fine engine, did its job very well
the listeroids can be made to be very near if not the same quality of an original.
as for mounting,,, if you believe it has to be mounted to concrete, then by all means do so, and god bless you,
i have never argued against this form of mounting, but i assure you that i damn sure could and be able to document my
reasoning against it.
but...
don't tell me that it is the only way a well balanced lister/oid engine can be safely mounted, and further don't tell me the engine life will be shorten because of resilient mounting if it is engineered and implimented properly.
i feel better now
bob g