Mounting an engine-----

[hotater]

After more than a year of experience, a lot of reading, and a LOT of work facing me in the next few weeks, I figured it's time to air out this subject.

Thanks to SHIPCHIEF for a MOST educational link to   http://www.chockfastgrout.com/indextwo.html

They have a file named,  Compressor_paper.pdf     GET IT!!!  Read it!!  It's talking about US and what's needed to make these engines last as they're supposed to.

They make the point that stationary engines and other gear are DESIGNED to use the rigid foundation it's attached to for crankcase stability and parts alignment.   With improper mounting the crankcase is not supported correctly and the engine will have a severely shortened life.  Stationary engines are SUPPOSED to have a crankcase that weighs up to TONS more than the material actually made as part of the engine.    The foundation, perfectly RIGID and VERY heavy supplies the rest of the mass to keep the parts aligned in the engine.

  Read about mounting bolts, too.  I never thought that a bolt supported the entire length by grout or concrete has lost it's ability to 'stretch'.

  There's a LOT to learn about doing this properly. 
     An improper mount is, sooner or later, lead to an engine case failure.  (I'm surprised mine hasn't broken apart)   THEN who's to blame?  The bad casting or the bad mount?   The dealers might want to get in on this to prevent warrantee claims that's actually the fault of the mounting system.  These are NOT portable engines.

My Listeroid has broken the floor slab away from the rest of the building it's sitting in.  That portion of the slab is five feet wide and seven feet long and no less than 5 inches thick at the thinnest and 12 inches around the edges.  (Monolithic slab on grade).  Tuesday one end of that slab, WITH a building on top of it as well as the Lister and genhead was moving up and down by .315" as measured with a dial indicator.   Water was sloshing out of the cooling tank and fuel was beginning to spew from the vents from constant vibration.  It was clear the whole works was going to self-destruct very shortly.  The engine was solid to it's wooden mount, and there was no movement between the mount and the floor, but between the floor and the rest of the Universe was a LOT of motion!

My first step for  possible immediate  relief was to add water around the foundation hoping the shrinkage of dry ground could have contributed.  After 12 hours and about 3,000 gallons of water, I fired up the Lister and watched the little geysers and mudboils form around the foundation, but in about an hour the floor was only moving .015"!!  This morning, after another 3000 gallons, it's even better.  (I bet the building is lower, though!)

Soon I'll have to re-mount the engine on a proper foundation.  I now have a MUCH better idea of what that is.

FORGET PORTABILITY unless you call separating the engine from it's two ton base 'portable'.

I'm going to scrap the wooden frame idea and mount the engine to reinforced concrete with I beams set flush with the surface to bolt to.  NO pads, no shock absorbers, no slack anywhere to give it a chance to work loose.  It's called 'embedded rail' mounting and makes a LOT of sense, now.  Its' going to be expensive, but it's sure as hell better than constantly fighting an engine that wants to go back home!

[t19]

Thanks for posting that.  I will have to take this into account with my shed floor design

[GuyFawkes]

My Listeroid has broken the floor slab away from the rest of the building it's sitting in.  That portion of the slab is five feet wide and seven feet long and no less than 5 inches thick at the thinnest and 12 inches around the edges.

60 inches wide
84 inches long
average say 8 inches thick

60 x 84 x 8 = 40,310 cubic inches.

60 odd cubic inches in a litre, so 672 liters, or about 2/3rd of a cubic metre / yard of concrete.


The following text is VERBATIM from the Lister 6/1 Start-o-natic manual.

FOUNDATIONS

Mount Generating set on a concrete block 2' 3" deep, including 3" above floor level, and 3" wider and longer than the base plate. When pouring concrete leave four holes inch square and 15 inches deep for holding down bolts.

When the concrete block is hard the set should be levelled up and a grouting mixture of cement and sand worked in under the bearing surfaces of the Baseplate. The bolts should be grouted in but not tightened down until the grout has set hard.

end of quote.

Note, four off 3/4" diameter bolts, none of the half inch stuff people appear to be using.

Note, four off inch square holes, eg use a bit of 2 x 2 , leaves a hole big enough for a three quarter bolt with a big plate at the bottom.

Note, 27" deep x 53" long x 24" wide, 27 x 53 x 24 =  34,344 cubic inches, less than hotaters block.

It's not the amount, it's the dimensions, you want a "block" and not a "slab" and you want a steel skid that is heavy and rigid enough to duplicate the start-o-matic cast iron (or welded steel, they made them too) base in mechanical properties.

HTH etc

[Andre Blanchard]

Very good stuff.
The web page does not work well for cut and paste of direct links, have to use a right click and copy link address.

Reference material page.
http://www.chockfastgrout.com/industrial/irefdata.html


On page 11 of this document.  This is the compressor paper.
http://www.chockfastgrout.com/industrial/PDFwebfiles03/Compressor_Paper.pdf
They say.
"
Prior to the 1970's, isolating an anchor bolt subject to predominantly tensile forces was
not a general practice and resulted in a great number of fatigued or broken bolts.
"
This is not quite right.  In the 1800's it was common but the practice was lost to many sometime in the early 1900's likely do to the rapid and major changes in engineering around WWII.


Also on page 11 is the line.
"
If a bolt is installed out of position, the most common solution is to
manipulate the bolt through the hole by some mechanical means.
"

This is more commonly known as, pound it over with a big hammer.

[Andre Blanchard]

Guy, on a Lister are the top surfaces of the mounting tabs/feet machined so that the nut is square when it is torqued down?
On the listeroids I have seen that surface is just rough cast and not very parallel with the bottom of the engine.

[GuyFawkes]

yes

large pic so you'll have to scroll sideways

[hotater]

Quote from Guy,  "It's not the amount, it's the dimensions, you want a "block" and not a "slab"...."

EXACTLY right.

Less than five feet from where my Lister is mounted on a 'slab' is a block of concrete 36inches square and 33 inhes high with a 12 HP Honda gas engine mounted to it on springy angle iron attached to the SIDES!!   Friggin' IDIOTS!!

 It's the old well pump prime mover that must have been hillarious to see 'try' to work.  It drove a driveshaft to an angle head that supported 125 feet of turbine pipe with three baskets on the end and .......NO clutch!!!  There's a bundle of burnt-up starter cables and old batteries laying here I can't reach around!
  Unfortunately this engine mounting block is outside the building and too tall to use for the Listeroid.  It would take a re-design of the roof to enclose it.

 There are two more of these one yard blocks on the property.  None are where they're useable (for ANYTHING) and all are attached to foundations below them.  It's hard to think of something more useless than a yard of incorrectly placed concrete....  

I've GOT to use the BIG, thick, block of un-reinforced concrete that was poured (in the WRONG place!) when some idiot ordered a extra truck-load from 40 miles away and had nowhere to dump it.   It's uphill from any natural hot water supply and has no shelter over it.   It's going to be impossible to heat  (Free 24/7 artesian hot water at present) and expensive to enclose and it'll move the genset noise right next to the building...it's unacceptable.

And its the only choice for now, unless I hand dig external footers to support the floor where it is now, or move the engine and cut out a big hole in the floor to pour a proper mount in....THIS is not the time of year to be working in a heated building with no way to turn it off!   The space is VERY crowded anyhow.....

THis place was built with an unlimited budget to do it wrong.  I'm trying to survive here by fixing it on NO budget.  It's tough and I'm sure as hell frustrated with constant work and no rest.

BTW, Guy.  My engine's mounting bolts had to be ground out some to fit the 1/2" studs it came mounted on the pallet with.  I'll have to expand them for bigger bolts.
  Good Point, Andre....rough cast surface as mine came out of the crate and out of level, too.   I squared and smoothed with a right angle grinder and used washers and flanged nuts as hold-downs.

[Geno]

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you Jack. Good luck. You’re a better fabricator than I. Thanks for the briefing on chockfastgrout.

Guy, thanks for the info on mounting. I feel foolish for thinking about mounting it on those boards in my shed. It must have been the sun and the thought of mixing up all that concrete. It wasn’t so bad though, it didn’t get above 80º today.

I read through the links for grout on an earlier post and decided to use it. I didn’t know how I was going to make the foundation level and flat before then but knew it was important. Not 20 minutes ago I got through pouring my foundation and am now on “break” I actually got pretty close to Lister specs. 62”x31”x17” block with another hole in the bottom center 8”x18” deep. 32.5, 80lb. bags of concrete. 2600 lbs. 33,696 cubic inches. 6, 10’ pieces of ½” rebar. 6, ½”x18” bolts for the frame with 8”x2” anchors on bottom. I just got the engine put together (again) and running yesterday and my static balance seems to have helped. I probably won’t run it again until it’s mounted SOLIDLY on the block.

http://www.genedevera.com/listeroid/#foundation

http://www.csgnetwork.com/concretecalc.html

Thanks, Geno

[hotater]

I don't know.... I think it'd been entertaining to see a green pogo stick with clown shoes on leaping across the yard.   

Good job!!   I poured eight sacks for a water project last week and NEEDED the hot springs.  Hopefully you have a hot tub to relax what's gonna kill you tomorrow!!

[Jim Mc]

I predict this thread, and the other one on broken bolts will be the end of the "balancing out the bounce" BS that was continuing on forever.  Once these puppies are bolted to a cubic yard of reinforced concrete, they don't bounce.  End of story.

Another point of reference comes from an old Mechanical Engineers' Handbook, by Marks.  In it, they recommend about 8 cubic feet of concrete/BHP for a stationary vertical engine, like the Lister.  So the 6 HP Listeroid would need about 48 cu ft, or just under 2 cubic yards.  Seems like a lot to me, but this was intended for plants installing engines that would see continuous use for many years. 

[schoust]

   Hey guy's has anyone tried to mount a Listeroid to one of those large blocks that they use to block areas of constuction off??I'm thinking that may be a way to go,but is it heavy enough??

[hotater]

Shoust---

You beat me to it.  I talked to a guy yesterday that works for Nev. hiway dept.  He has a 'Jersey Barrier' with the upper corners broken off.  I'm thinking about standing it upside down, drilling the mounting bolt holes through the bottom, standing it in a pit and pouring concrete around it.  That would put the engine on a stack of concrete 3 feet tall...BUT,  I don't know yet how wide the base, which becomes the top, is.  He's measuring today.

Also,  A local concrete company pours interlocking blocks for silage pits.  They're a yard each and can be delivered and placed on site.  There'd be a LOT of drilling to do!!!

[GuyFawkes]

This should do, see matey even has a nice saw handly to square it up for you.

 

[GuyFawkes]

Also,  A local concrete company pours interlocking blocks for silage pits.  They're a yard each and can be delivered and placed on site.  There'd be a LOT of drilling to do!!!

If they pour their own on site and are local, maybe you can talk them into letting you stick 4 bits of softwood 2x2 into the pour before it sets?

Better still ask if they pour the concrete blocks used as crane counterweights, in extremis, an old steel water tank as mould and shell, just install your mounting bolt fixings first, truck it to them and just pour in whatever it takes to fill.


Many years ago knew an old guy by the name of Henry Wong, what he could do with 45 gallon drums, either empty for buoyancy in water, or poured full of concrete for mass on land, would blow your mind, that and manual labour only and he would work with literally hundreds and thousands of ton masses.

[Andre Blanchard]

Kind of side steps the main advantage of cement, and that is you do not have to have or rent the equipment needed to move and accurately set in place a 4000# block in one piece.
Cement comes in nice easy to handle 90lb bags, sand an washed rock come in truck or trailer loads and all of this is easily broken down into spade shovel size quantities to be transferred to a smaller trailer and moved to places the truck cannot go.  And water comes out of a hose or at worst is hauled in a tank or buckets.

But a big block of that pink granite that Starrett uses for surface plates sure would look nice.