I'm trying to drive a generator with a slant six. Problem is, I can't find a stub shaft or flange that will bolt to my flywheel or crankshaft. The flywheel has a six-hole, 10-5/8 bolt pattern, and the crank has a six-bolt 3-11/16 pattern except one hole is offset a little. I've also got a flex plate with a four-bolt 10" pattern that can sit alongside the flywheel. Any ideas how to get a shaft out the bell housing?

Thanks.

I would use the flywheel and clutch setup from a manual trans car and along with the manual transmission's input shaft and bearing retainer to drive the generator head. You should be able to find a sealed bearing to replace the open bearing of the transmission input shaft.

Older 3-speed bellhousings can often be had for the asking. A transmission input shaft should be cheap too.

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Joshua

Thank Joshie. That's similar to the advice I got from somebody else. I do have the bell housing but unfortunately I don't have the clutch assembly or transmission input shaft. I'll try to hunt those down.

I wouldn't mind spending $150 or so if I could just get the durn stub shaft fabricated.

Mating with crankshaft - sounds awfully painful to me...

I'm with Josh here.

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

Lou, I thought the same thing! That pilot hole is awfully small!

Karl, You don't really need a pressure plate as you can drill the clutch disc and flywheel and bolt them together, but having a clutch that could slip if something catastrophic happened has some merit.

What does your generator head look like? Are you going to mount it directly to the bellhousing? If it is direct mounted and the generator head has two bearings you might want to put a Lovejoy coupling on the generator head and modify a trans input shaft to accept the other 1/2 of the coupling. You wouldn't need or want the transmission input bearing in that case.

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Joshua

It looks plenty accomodating to me, Hoss.



The generator head has a 60mm/~2.3in keyed shaft. Shaft couplings are cheap and easy, so I'm not worried about shaft styles. It's the non-SAE flywheel that's giving me problems. Unless I can find a flywheel-mounted flexible coupling, such as the flywheel coupling from Guardian, the genny will be too far away to touch the bell housing. The motor and genny will be rigidly mounted on a steel frame though.

I do plan to use a flexible coupling so I don't think I need the clutch. I don't have the clutch disk anyway.

I could weld or bolt a flanged shaft onto the flywheel, but knowing me and my drill press the centering and balance would be crap. I could use belts instead of direct drive to fix this, but attaching a sheave to the flywhe-el is still hard plus then I can't use the bell housing and I'll have to fabricate a bracket to hold the starter.

I guess the best is to drive the genny direct using a tractor-style pto shaft with two universals. Otherwise you have to align the shafts real well or you'll grind up your flexible coupling. There's a tool called the SHAFT HOG for this, but it's big bucks. That's a shame because I'd like to have one just for the name.

Maybe I should just bring the flywheel to somebody and have them make a pto. Can anybody suggest something near Seattle? I hear Drivelines NW mentioned a lot.

Can you mount the generator to the bellhousing and have the generator shaft concentric to the hole in the bellhousing? If so just join a piece of a trans input shaft to a Lovejoy type coupling and you're home free. You might need to space the generator head away from the bellhousing to make space for the generator shaft, but that doesn't seem too awful. You could probably even get away without a Lovejoy if you were accurate enough and made a coupler to directly join the generator shaft with a piece of trans input shaft. Bolting the clutch disc to the flywheel would get the pressure plate out of the way and gain some room. Hmm, makes me think I should try this with my spare slant. Broaching of the coupler would be the only hard/expensive part. Now that I think about it... A coupler that would bolt on with long flywheel bolts that has a 60mm ID keyed hole would be even better. It would look like a flywheel spacer with that 60mm hole, but go behind the flywheel of course. Clear as mud?

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Joshua

I like the idea of a Lovejoy type coupling. How do they couple up oil rigs,
tree chipper machines, or even outdrives on an I/O boat???? maybe you could look places like these for an idea.

Without a clutch, would there be stress on the generator on startup? Isn't a slant six overpowered for a generator, or is this a big one? Great discussion what with the mating and the shaft hog and the lovejoy. 'Keep it up'.

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/6 '67 Barracuda convertible, electronic ignition, 4-OD, street cam, SBP KH discs, 3.55 SG 7.25" 1" t-bars. Bilstein.
340 '67 fastback, Doug Nash 5-speed.
1988 Toyota pickup work truck

Most generators are directly driven by their prime mover. You just don't put an electrical load on the generator until it's up to speed. You also remove the electrical load before shutting down the engine.

I own a couple of small Wisconsin driven generators. One is 1kW rope start from the 1940s and the other is a 5kW twin with a start winding on the generator armature. Both turn 1800 RPM and are quite heavy for their output. The 5kW is anchored to a concrete pad next to my garage and is wired to my generator sub-panel. We'll see if the storm that's coming in knocks out the power or not.

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Joshua