On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:57:15 GMT, Ignoramus30369
wrote:

A very cool video. I am wondering, why in the middle of the video
there is a brief very sharp loud noise noise like someone is shooting
a full auto Kalashnikov into the air?

After startup, about 12 seconds into the video, I pulled the
"Throttle" closed.

At 14 seconds into the video I "Revved" it back up to half throttle,
which is where I believe your hearing the machine gun sound.

At 16 seconds into the video I went to full throttle, held it for a
moment and then shut her down.

Of interest, while I'm starting the engine, did you notice the steel
welding table move? While the table is on casters, it's pretty
difficult to push around with that 500lb engine on it. However the
engine produces so much torque during startup, it moved itself and the
table!

One somewhat funny / scary event was later in the day when I had the
engine on the shop floor and started it at half throttle. With the
engine still bolted to the floor of its wooded shipping container, as
the first several power strokes happened the whole engine hopped
around on the shop floor doing little "Wheelies". For several moments
I was rather confident the engine was going to do a back flip!


Second, is it true that the engine is shut down by interrupting flow
of fuel to the low pressure pump? I thought so because it took a while
to stop.

Nope. The throttle and shut off are all the same mechanism, which are
part of the diesel fuel injector governor. Basically, the throttle
handle you saw on Jeff's ChangFa pictures, pulls on a spring. The
spring pulls on the governor lever arm. As RPM's increase the force
needed to hold the lever in position increases, and this whole system
works as the governor.

When you put the throttle in the "Stop" position, all that is
happening is your not pulling on the spring loaded governor, thus the
diesel fuel injector aims for "zero" rpms (or something like that).
BTW, there is no electronic shut off, the engine can be ran without
any electrical system, that is if your man enough to start it with the
hand crank!

The reason it took so long for the engine to come to a stop is the
100+ pound fly wheel! The motor will coast to stop even longer if the
compression release handle is opened at shut down.

One thing that sort of scares me is, when you have the engine at "Full
Throttle", you can reach back behind the cover and manually pull the
fuel injector lever, which will over rev the engine.

The whole setup reminds me of a typical lawn mower engine governor
that uses the airflow off the fly wheel to govern engine RPM. As a
kid, I knew I could get the ridding lawn mower really moving if I
reached down and manually opened the carb butterfly I won't be
experimenting with this on the Diesel!!!!!

All in all, sounds like a very interesting project. I am particularly
interested if you are going to give this system a load test.

I will once I get her assembled, Current plan is to hook the
generator up to both my powder coat oven and the Tig Welder.

The powder coat oven pulls a steady 30amps @ 220vac, or 6.6Kw

I'll use the Tig welder as a variable source to see how much I can
pull out of the generator system. I know the TIG will pop a 50amp
breaker, so it should be enough to push the generator up to its rated
15Kw.

The diesel engine claims that it will do 16.2Kw for 1 hour @ 2200 rpm.
I don't expect that much out of it however since I'll be running it at
1800 rpm, but we'll see what we see


Take Care,
James Lerch
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm (My telescope construction, Testing, and Coating site)

Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge