LowGear,
I had a lengthy conversation with my brother, about wasted horsepower, and I'm getting my mind wrapped around the point that your making. Not wanting to sound dumb, but I was struggling with the concept that even though my engine and gen head were in sync in regards to movement, I was still losing hp due to the engine having to move that block. In my mind I was thinking that the block movement was a by product after the fact that the gen head received it's share of the engines output. Now I'm up to speed with the notion that the more focused the engines efforts are to one purpose the more efficient it will be.
I'm coming to the conclusion that as the Moody Blues said: It's a question of balance!
Not only of the engine but of the system. I had my eye set on isolating the vibration due to the fact that I've read so many posts concerned with this issue, I had a theory I wanted to pursue and so I did. And, to be honest, the way the system runs currently is rather pleasant, everything has a comfortable inline jiggle to it, no sense of hard impact or concern for aggressive wear. On top of that I believe that if we restrain these beasts too much they'll more than likely tear themselves apart.
But, I do want to harness as much of the potential power as I can muster for this engine, so I'm going to approach this in stages. First off I'm going to work on balancing the engine as best I can. From what I'm gathering, if I can minimize the fore and aft movement then learn to live with the up and down movement caused by combustion then I'll be doing good. After that, I like your idea of the hardwood wedges just to see how the unit reacts to getting restricted in it's movement.
Thank you for your guidance and your complements, there are some things I know how to do right!
Regards,
Murph'