generating own power

In the beginning, the ' blackouts' will only occur on the very coldest winter days when the wind isn't blowing.

This should give you enough forewarning not to start on long ,fine feed facing, or longtitudinal cuts.

Electricity will go first, but the pilgrims will have realised that domestic gas supply will be maintained to the very last. Therefore, anyone seriously considering standby power should try to use gas as the primary fuel.

.

Excellent: Just the sort of thing we need to know

Thanks

MichaelG.

In "the good old days" some lathes were powered directly from the pulley on a petrol or Diesel engine.

With all the Steam Engines that seem to get built by Model Engineers, I would have expected somebody to suggest steam power by now.

Trying to avoid falling into an obvious trap... That's my excuse, & I'm sticking to it.

Regards,

Richard

Er... a flywheel?

Don't think you'd want to power it with one of those hit & miss engines though. The speed variation is visible/audible even to an untrained eye/ear.

Regards,

Richard

I would not like to run a lathe direct from a big single cylinder engine, esp. a diesel. I'm basing this on my experience of running a saw mill, 36" dia blade, with a Petter diesel. Engine slows down under load until the governor picks up. Under continuous cut it was fine. A long belt is a big help, mine was a 2" flat belt about 6 ft c/c and could have been twice that. My thinking is to change to DC motors and run of a battery or 4, need not be expensive if you get 2nd hand motors.

It may not be the best way, but for 40 or 50 years, an awful lot of hobbyists and small jobbing shops ran lathes on small petrol engines of almost any type, so it must be practical.

Neil

Any lathe powered by an internal combustion engine, petrol or diesel, will require a clutch so that the lathe spindle can be stopped and started at will without having to start or stop the engine.

I find small engines react quicker on the governor, that helps a bit. My first lathe, and the saw bench, had fast and loose pulleys, simple and work well. I suppose technically a clutch?

In my amateur radio days, our club used to run its National Field Day stations from a single cylinder diesel generator. Although our usual site was fairly rural, there were houses within earshot, especially at night when the ambient sound level was otherwise low. We attempted to confine the diesel noise by 'circling the wagons' around the generator with three or four cars. It owed more to wishful thinking than to acoustics!

The diesel noise is predominantly low frequency, difficult to silence, and I used to wonder whether the noise from a gas turbine, being higher in frequency, might be easier to suppress. It would have been interesting to lay hands on an ex-aircraft APU but I had no idea whether such an item would have been available, from where and at what cost!

Drag racers seem to get quite large gas turbines from somewhere so it must be possible.

Another big unknown was the maintenance burden for an APU. Do they run for the whole duration of a flight or just until the main engines are running?

Oh, well, interesting but not on my project list anymore!!!

Best regards,

Swarf, Mostly!

Edited By Swarf, Mostly! on 17/06/2015 13:20:18

What about a perpetual motion machine ? It would cost nothing to run and go on forever !

You could try and harness the worm.

We are left with either, buying an old dis-used watermill, or windmill, or moving to Iceland ( thermal ).

Do you see where this is going and doesn't it show you how dependent we are on our utilities and

what an utter mess we will be in ( soon ) ?