Adding a FlyBall governor to an existing hit-miss engine

Racer57

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H-M Supporter Gold Member
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Aug 4, 2021
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One of my Christmas presents was a kit to build a ball turner for my SB 9A lathe. That went well and I practiced making ball things. I ended up with a nice pair of brass fly balls. They didn't have a home and I decided to convert one of my motors with a flywheel governor to fly ball.

There was a lot of on the fly engineering. The end result works very well. Not really any better than before but it looks more impressive.


A keen eyed observer will note that there is LOTS of run out on one flywheel. I am pretty sure that the crankshaft is failing. I have many hours of smooth running before now. I think that I was too aggressive with the timing and beat the crank to death. I will do some debug but right now the motor is in the sin bin. If I need to make a new crank I will add bigger flywheels for more coast down.

Will
 
I went to work on the motor to figure out the crankshaft issues. I turns out that the crank was solid - just bent. It obviously hit harder than I thought when it fell. The good news is that my crank build technique is strong. There were no issues in any of the joints.

I made a new crank and took the opportunity to make new and bigger flywheels. I used the ChrisH and RayD technique using 5-lb cast iron weights as the base starting points. The attachments are tapered split bushings. They work GREAT. This is the first time that I haven't needed to chase the flywheels to keep them tight. The acceleration stress when the piston fires must be significant.

I still can't get the hit-miss fire and coast down to work as well as I would like. The bigger flywheels help but still not the classic behavior.

Thank you for looking.

 
That is much better with the new flywheels and runs great.

Ray
 
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