The new engine room ... with pics

[Tom]

Well I've got the the Listeroid properly mounted to its brand new block of concrete in the new engine shed.

The exhaust goes down into an LP tank muffler buried in the floor.
 
 And then out the side of the hill.

And the oft discussed block of concrete. I chose to sandwich a bit of wood in there for a bit of cushion.
 

It had a 3.5 hour run yesterday charging batteries and joy of joys no cracks in the concrete, which is a significant achievement since now that it is firmly attached to the ground it shakes the ground, shed and house. I guess I'll have to add balancing to the list of things I need to do. 

[Tom]

If you look at the top pic, you'll see it is the leg of the cooling tank stand. I think the cooling tank will be going away soon, to be replaced by a 40 gal electric water heater mounted to the wall. I will be doing similar to you Jens and piping the hot water into a hydronic loop in the basement slab.

I'm still undecided, but I think I will just vent the new tank through the roof and let it boil when I don't need the hot water, which will not be very often. It seems that when the batteries need charging is when the sun doesn't shine and I seem to need heat at those times too.

[wrightkiller]

NICE!!!

[rcavictim]

Egg sealant! 

[assiduous1]

Looks good Tom.  It looks similar to something that all of us need behind our house. 

If you use a Gas hot water heater tank you could funnel some of the exhaust heat through that too.

[Tom]

I chose to lose the exhaust heat because I didn't want to deal with cleaning out the soot and the possibility of a stack fire.

[MacGyver]

Nice looking concrete block Tom! Wow. What a lot of concrete to mix.
I'm a little bummed to hear that it shakes the house. Do you think balancing will help, or is it just the power stroke THUMP that shakes things.  Does it shake stuff under no load also? Or just when loaded?

Next summer I hope to build a shed and pour a block for mine and I'd like mine pretty close to the house also, so I'm curious how it goes for you...

Right now mine just has the frame bolted to 3 large chunks of 6 x 8 lumber that are buried in a pit filled with road-base gravel (which packs down real well)
That seems to work fine for now, but it's certainly not ideal.

Your shed looks nice. It might make me a little claustrophobic to start it in there, because it looks like if something "weird" happens when starting there isn't much room to step backwards away from it...

[Tom]

Well backwards is out the door, from there I've got lots of room.  I wanted a bigger room, but had to work with the limited space I had.

Good question about the thump. I'll have to analyze it a bit more, perhaps see if it stops when I lift the fuel lever. It does feel like it is the power stroke doing it. I plan to get some clay and stick on wheel weights and try to balance it better. Although the balance didn't seem to bad to begin with.

The concrete wasn't to bad to mix, I have a 3.5 cu ft mixer some one gave me years ago and this was a chance to use it. After replacing the lunched bearings on the drum it worked fine. It took 3 of us about 2 hours to do the slab and I did the block my self (since now I'm an expert concrete mixer  ) and it took about 2 hours too. The hard part was digging the footings, trench for the exhaust, forms and iron work.

[BigGreen]

Very nice work 

My 25/2 vibrated my 20X20 shed to where you couldn't stand in there for long without it numbing your feet until I did the spill timing on the IP's. That almost eliminated it. Now it's bearly noticable.

Dave

[Tom]

You know I didn't retime it after adding the bronze idler gear and the offset bolt. I should recheck. Thanks for the info!