Appreciate the reply. Not sure if it was intended that way, I hope not, but seemed a bit condescending for I know what the round thingie as you said, is for that is how I know it uses a tachometer. The tach would make it much easier to tune and is useful to judge performance and/or problems. I think it might be difficult to find the right drive cable even though it is American threads, 18 pitch, and instead of the normal square drive it appears to require a key type cable. Without a tach you have no way of knowing the actual RPMs. I ran across an article that related the RPM to frequency in this case 60 Hz.
No, I wasn't being condescending. Just do not know how much you know. Lots of folks who post here are a little shaky on this kind of stuff. When I said "thingie", it was more or less because I live here in Germany, and am losing my English. Been here too long.
That's a good article. That's what I meant in my post about the MT measurement. When we wanted to check RPM, we looked at the hertz meter. If the freq transducer drives the meter to 60 Hertz, then the engine has to be running at 3600 RPM. Yeah the set had a place to hook up a Tac, never saw it done. Not even in the third level maintenance shop.
These are good engines. And good gen sets. Are you going to use it a lot? Or just for house backup? Once again, I don't know what you know about this engine. But we ran them 24/7, 365 days a year. Here are a few tips.
Keep an eye on your oil. The set has a LOP, so that no big deal. The problem is overfull oil. The fuel pump is driven off the crank. There is a diafram in the fuel pump that can, (and often did) go bad. The oil level goes up, the oil smells like gas. At some point, you get oil in the jugs. Since these engines are now older then most folks in the forum, this is something more then likely to happen.
The carbs like for you to feed them Carb cleaner every so often. We had lots of problems with lacquer build up, and carbs not working right. Carbs are hard to find for this engine. And there are two different types. One is to be found. One is not. They are interchangeable.
A good habit to get into is to lube the ball joint on the ends of the rod running from the Gov to the carb, every time you check oil. Some of the ball joints have been painted over. Hurts the smooth operation of the carb/Gov action. When the joints get dry, they rust up. Then they lock up, or vibrations make the joint fall apart.
Ah yes. You can check oil with the engine running. But do put the dip stick back in, at a perfect 90 degree angle. If you tip it off to the side, it will jump back out at you. It will hurt. You will say things your kids/grand kids don't need to hear. If when checking oil, you get oil shooting out at you, first check the oil for gas in the oil. If that's not it, you might need rings.
I would pull the plugs every 150-200 hours and check/clean/reset them. The cables are tough, but we often had them go bad in the early 70's.
The silver relays in the control cube can sometimes go bad. 28 bucks in flee bay.
A good place to look for engine parts are the swamp airboat people. Lots of them use this engine, along with Ultra Light aircraft.
