"Lane" lane (no spam) at copperaccents dot com wrote in message
...

"Harold and Susan Vordos" wrote in message
news:42a00e08
I'm curious how you did this. Weld up a water jacket around the cylinder?

Lane

No. The cylinder was mounted on a rotary table so the fins could be
either
reduced or eliminated, using a stub arbor and a side cutter, then a
stainless band was fabricated that was held by a pair of stainless hose
clamps. The top and bottom fins were left almost full size in order
to
create the water area between them. The fins didn't go all around, so
the
jacket terminated with pressure pads. It worked like a charm. Made a
new
head from aluminum, and a water pump. This went into a boat that didn't
have room for a commercial power plant. It drove an 80 amp alternator
and
worked flawlessly as long as we had the boat, which had an electric
refrigerator, the reason for the needed additional charging capacity.
I
have pics if you're interested. Let me know and I'll forward them to
you.

Harold



Very interesting, thanks. Another thing comes to mind with this kind of
conversion. I know that engines are engineered to operate at certain
temperatures for efficiency. Wouldn't a conversion as you describe have
changed the operating temperature to such a drastic degree to upset that
efficiency? Or isn't that the case with air cooled engines?

Lane


In my opinion, for what it's worth, yes, the operating efficiency is and was
altered, likely not anywhere nearly as good as it may have been, but I had
no alternative. It was important to get a functioning generator because
we had two dead batteries almost constantly. While it was likely harder
on fuel running slightly cooler, imagine what it was costing us to run
around Lake Powell for hours just to charge our batteries. We'd go
through 80 gallons of fuel in a day. From all indications, we could run
the power plant for hours on just a couple gallons of gasoline. A much
better deal, and we didn't have to have the boat in motion to do so. At
night, when we sat around a big fire, sipping scotch and listening to music,
I'd run it to get the batteries fully charged for the night. By then, I
had installed yet another battery, so we had three. The third was isolated
from the other two and used for only light duty, assuring we had power to
start the generator should the other batteries puke.

One of the things I did was to go to a hotter plug, so it wouldn't foul
prematurely. I'm not convinced even that was necessary. As I said, we had
absolutely no problems with the unit, which we used for several years. It
was still functioning flawlessly when we sold the boat back in '90.

I had tried an earlier version of the power plant, using an air cooled
engine. Even with a second blower running, the engine compartment got way
too hot. By going to the water cooled engine, including a water cooled
exhaust system, that was no longer a problem. I ran the second blower
alone afterwards, and it kept the engine compartment at an acceptable
temperature.

Harold