Military Genset

Doug - Iowa · Jul 13, 2011

Here is central IA we had a pretty bad windstorm earlier this week. Our little town was spared serious damage but out of power for the last couple days. We have two military generators, one is a 1945 gas unit with a mechancial govenor that runs like a watch. The other is a 70's deisel that has a complicated hydrualic over electronic govener that is a PITA. We never did get it to settle down and stay stable, the cycles were all over the place and it would surge and buck at the slightest load variation. Damn near fried the well pump with it. I think the biggest problem is the electronic control.

Is there any place in the midwest I could take this beast ahnd have all the mil stuff stripped off and a mechcanical govener put on it? All I need is a throttle and volt/amp/cycle gauges and we can take it from there. Any mil genset experts out there? Thanks!

Mark - IN. · Jul 13, 2011

When I was in the Army, my unit had a couple of 60Ks and a couple of 30ks and we had to use load banks to insure they were running somewhere in the nature of 70% constant. Maybe a little more, I don't remember. If they didn't, they were all over the place. So long as we kept a constant load on them, great. Wish I had one of the 30Ks now. Then again, technologies have come a long way since then.

That reminds me of something. Whenever would get sent out to a site to repair radio equipment, we would start with a map to get the general location of where we would be heading, in the dark of night, but to zero in, we would stop and shut the jeep off and listen for a gen set. If didn't hear it, start up and go a mile and do it again and again until we heard them, and thats where we were going. Enemy did the same thing though.

Mark

El Toro · Jul 13, 2011

We use to test those generator sets where I worked for the US Army. Cummins Diesel may be able to install one of their magnetic pickup's on the flywheel and use one of their governors.
Some of those generator sets we tested were 100kw with Cummins diesel engines and they would hold their settings very well. We tested them on 50 and 60 hertz. We had load banks for loading the generators. Had to switch to jet fuel in the Winter since the diesel fuel would jell and shut the units down. Hal

Military Genset

Doug - Iowa

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Mark - IN.

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El Toro

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