Adding a FlyBall governor to an existing hit-miss engine

R

Racer57

H-M Supporter - Gold Member
H-M Supporter Gold Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2021
Messages
32
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
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top