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Feb 1 2004 Longevity in the German designed Horizontal Single Cylinder Asian Built Singles. I receive thousands of visits per month, and I receive a good number of emails with feedback regarding engine performance; what works well what doesn't. There are things I see that appear real attractive, one is the neat little Chinese engines with built in radiators sitting right on top of the engine where the hopper is usually found. This same unit is often equipped with a small fan that runs constantly; there's also an idler pulley and a metric sized VEE belt that runs the fan....... "How Cute"..... I've received several emails from folks that are really happy with this setup, the happy ones have between 5 and 100 hours of run time. The ones who complain have 150 hours or more on their engines. Ken is losing water in his, and is looking for a Metric belt that will fit properly, right now he's using an A or B belt, (I forget which one) but it's not right. I suspect the water loss is coming from a very small leak in the core, the water may be evaporating off at this point, because Ken can find no leaks. I get reports of sheet metal parts cracking from the vibration, radiator cores developing leaks, One engine had a seized idler pulley which smoked the belt, this eventually brought the engine to a screaming halt when it over heated. The owner is currently accessing the damage and will see if he can rebuilt same, I think he's going to convert to thermal cooling to avoid another failure. If you have an engine like this, consider rigging a thermal shut down. You might rig a flapper that closes off the air to the air cleaner, or something that slackens the governor spring when overheating is detected. Why hard mount parts to an engine when you don't have to? Why not mount a radiator away from the engine and all the vibration that may cause the core to work harden and crack causing coolant to be lost? Why use a mechanical fan (parasitic load) with all the potential failure points of the idler, belts, frictional losses, etc? It is all too easy to cool these engines with a closed hopper cooling system, or a closed thermal cooling system. We are NOT trying to dissipate the heat created from a 200 Horse power engine, it doesn't take as much air flow, or surface area to get the job done. If you're worried about overheating, use a car radiator and the electric fan that was mated to it, trace down the lead to the fan, and pull the threshold temp sensor that activates it and use it in your cooling system. All you need is on the nearest junked auto with inlets and outlets on the top and bottom of the radiator, don't use cross flow radiator designs in a thermal siphon design. There's another bonus to using this setup, if the radiator does develop a leak, the radiator cap gets lost, or broken, you can replace it with another radiator from the nearest junked auto. This is certainly appealing to the survivalist types, but it should be appealing to those of us on a budget, and those of us who just plain like to be self sufficient. Buying engines using the counter balance shafts is a good idea, these usually start at the 185 size, but may vary by vendor. We have one person on the West coast who has logged thousands of hours on the 1115, he runs 12 hours a day, and makes use of the heat to heat his home and domestic hot water as well as run the gen head.
He has been shutting the genset down once every 24 hours, this has proved to be a good thing. Once shut off for a check, the Engine failed to start. With a little investigation, it was discovered that the intake valve was leaking. Andy is not positive that adequate clearance was maintained in the valve train, but he did check for that once the problem was discovered and it seemed OK in it's cooler state. Andy didn't like the alignment of the rocker arm with the valve stem. Andy said he was amazed how easy it was to pull the head and liked how sturdy everything looked. There was an area on the intake valve that lost it's seal, this problem grew worse with combustion gases till the problem was found during a routine shut down. It was also found that the hard water than Andy was using in the evap cooling had almost completely blocked some of the cooling passages. it is not known if this caused some vapor pockets that aggravated a problem or added enough temperature to use up the valve clearance. After inspecting the valves, Andy decided to do a three angle valve job on the seats and the valve faces. He said both the valves and valve seats were VERY hard and it took more than the normal effort to lap them in. Andy felt this was a sign of an engine built to last a long time. I suggest that we check our engines for proper valve lash, and discard the evap cooling if you're going to run the engine a bunch. After investigating the use of hard water in a hopper, it appears it has caused numerous problems in other cases. If you are going to keep your hopper cooling, I would set up a barrel to collect rain water or find another source of mineral free water for the hopper.
As of this entry, I have learned more about this design. Hardy Diesel probably has more experience with this design than anyone in North America. They have pointed out that the bearings on the counter balance shafts are well loaded and these bearings need to be of good quality and in good condition. If the bearing on the counter balance (oil pump end) fails, it will wear at the pump drive pin, eventually causing a failure. If you don't have an oil pressure shut down, you could lose the engine. IMHO, you'll need a closed system with a proper coolant to run 24/7, and you better have an oil pressure shut down or alarm.... anything less puts your engine at risk. I'll be looking for other 24/7 runs, email me if you try it.
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