What kind do you have?


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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, January 27, 2003 at 3:37AM :

In Reply to: military generators, U R my last hope posted by cliff/utah on Sunday, January 26, 2003 at 6:59PM :

The newer ones with the air-cooled V-4 3600 rpm gas engine are easy to get parts for and most parts interchange with 2- and 1-cylinder "military standard" gas engines. Saturn surplus is a good source. I have loads of piston rings somewhere if that should happen to be what you need. The engine, made by Continental, is rather like an aircraft engine, and I found a web site of a guy who ups the power and uses them in ultralight airplanes.

If it's an older one, I may be able to help from experience. I have one (120V 1-phase) from 1958 with a cute little 65 cu in Hercules water-cooled flathead 4 turning 1800 rpm. It's not very efficient but I expect it'll run darn near forever compared to the lawnmower-motor-powered ones they sell at the discount stores. I had to replace the crank and rod bearings in it, and found the guy who has all the old herc stock. I have the residue of another one with a continental flathead that put out 120/240 1-phase or 3-phase until somebody canibalized all the controls out of it.

All of them use magnetos which are very expensive if the magnets wear out, but are good because you don't need a battery to make them go.

Another neat mil genset is the 3kW low-voltage DC (24 V nominal but you can get it down to 12) unit that is intended for cranking bigger engines. I have one out at my cabin where there's no plug-in electricity and it's very nice to know that if a vehicle has a dead battery or is hard to start because of cold or whatever, I can fire this generator up without a battery via its pull-cord and it'll put out 100 amps to crank the dead motor as long as there's gas in its tank.



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