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Custom Direct Drive for Chinese Singles GREAT NEWS! beginning 10-2007 Allmand provides Custom Drives directly to DIYers! Send your request by clicking here important, you will need to edit the (no spam) out of the email address before you send it! >Allmand Direct drive in Africa< Easy to install, easy to align, and no smoking Vee belts or expensive pulleys! Have you stopped to think just how rare belts and pulleys are in generator construction 'WHEN' the engine speed and generator head are compatible speed wise? Vee Belts add tremendous losses to your gen set, and you can NOT believe the difference between hand cranking a direct drive unit versus vee belt unit. There will be a noticeable difference in fuel economy, and if you haven't experienced how quickly these vee belts wear with the smaller stock pulleys, you'll soon learn. Smaller built people will have little trouble manually starting a direct drive unit, but I have trouble with the VEE belt setups myself, and I'm no wimp! "they really slow down the cranking!" If you use a far larger generator head that the engine can handle, you will work the elastic coupler more. If you have a 15kw head hooked to a 195 or 1115, it's a major waste of money, and a poor idea. If you look at the basic physics, the lighter the rotor is, the less work the coupler has to do, and the longer it will live, I know people who have run thousands of hours on one easily replaced and inexpensive elastic spider. I saw one account on the internet regarding Harmonics and the likes in couplers, and there was mention that belts are less trouble (in their opinion :-) From my experience, and the feed back I get from a good many readers, this is NOT the case. Using a far heavier than necessary Gen head also punishes a VEE belt. if we look at the power stroke and the compression stroke, we'll see a difference in speed, the heavier the rotor, the more the belt is whipped between cutting in on the power stroke, and backing out of the vee as the flywheel rotation slows. In both cases, the heavier than necessary rotor of the generator prematurely wears the belt or creates more need for the elastic coupler to mitigate things with changes in velocity. You may be happy with the service life even when it is poorly matched, but properly matching a gen head to the engine is a smart exercise, and longer life of replaceable drive components is assured. Another thing to remember, idling a diesel engine can punish a belt or coupler, and again, the punishment is in direct proportion to the Gen rotor mass. Don't idle generators for a warm up, and if you must, make it a fast idle. There's a standard used in Asia where pulleys are fitted to engines using a three point pattern. The 185s, 195s, 1100s, and 1115s from different manufacturers have the same mounting pattern and accept the same pulleys (with exceptions here and there) See the Changfa page for examples of the direct drive. Direct Drive If you look over an Asian engine; you'll notice there's only enough crank shaft hanging out of the engine to mount the flywheel. To make matters even more difficult, the flywheel is held on by a big nut that sticks out further than the face of the flywheel. This makes it a little harder to fashion a direct drive base, and if the raised center is too large, it will interfere with the mounting.
Here's the Allmand direct drive base, this part can be used to mount several sizes of jaw couplers, and can also be fitted with a 'STUB' shaft to receive sheaves (pulleys) other than the stock unit. The raised center portion is designed to clear the flywheel fastener. The three holes in the lower flat area align with the Asian flywheel pulley mounting points. The recess in the top, and the four inner holes accept the L1xx Style Love Joy Coupler that is so popular in North America.
Above is the bottom side (flywheel side) of the adapter. The Asian system relies on the machined lip to 'center' the pulley or adapter onto the flywheel. This lip can be seen above.
Here's the completed 2nd generation adapter, Allmand has refined this unit further, and he has built fixtures to machine the new third generation unit in, it's better and stronger, there is still a lot of machining necessary to build this part, and Allmand provides the part that makes it easy to put your own generator together. Six Pin Love Joy coupler parts can be purchased throughout the world. Emerson Bearing and Applied Industrial are examples of the USA suppliers that will provide you parts. No doubt, there are other couplers out there, but there are dividends paid when you design around these MOST common parts. There are hundreds of Allmand Direct Drive Couplers in use, and I'm pleased to say they have made their way into other parts of the world to replace VEE belts.
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