Mil-Spec, the best you can do?

well today is a real treat we have a broken generator in the garage now this is an army MEP 831a 3 kilowatt generator it has a diesel engine it can put out both 120 and 240 volts I'm really excited to try to fix it up and get it working I bought it at auction a week ago I brought it inside the garage and let it dry out and today we're going to start attacking it and see if we can get it running here we go [Music] hi I'm David and I'm on a mission to take my house and garage off-grid now part of that is to have a backup generator system because the sun doesn't always shine especially here in the northeast of the United States so having a backup generator is a very nice thing to have when you're trying to go off grid I don't think it's going to take a whole lot of work to get it going but let's go through it together I'm just going to show you what it is as it sits now the only thing that I've done so far is I brought it inside the garage which is heated and I've let it dry out for a week this gen set was manufactured in 2007 it's currently 2023 so we have a 16 year old Generator on our hands but it only has 25 hours on it so it hasn't been used a lot now sometimes these have low hours because they've gone through what's called reset I don't see a reset tag on this one so I think those are original hours and I also think it was a test unit this gauge over here was not original it's not on a normal setup and I think they added that to measure oil pressure we have a bunch of extra temperature sensors all over the unit so in this case this one was stuck in the exhaust and is partially melted so this unit is not in that bad of shape this pressure gauge is not original and what's funny is that the oil pressure can actually exceed 100 PSI so they should have had a larger one we have a little bit of Dent down here it sat outside for a while because this emergency stop is usually red we even have a couple of drain on the back so we've got fuel oil drain back to the front this is where we will hook up our 120 and 240 volt legs if we open up the cover we have access to the wiring so we've got our speed control we got a couple of relays it's a nice little setup I really like these units well let's look down under the hood we have here a single cylinder Yanmar diesel engine the engine is an L70 model about six horsepower continuous this is where the fuel filter usually goes this is the bowl that goes underneath it they drain the fluids for auction and over here this is actually a permanent magnet alternator so it's creating wild three phase to go into this inverter yes this is an old original kind of inverter design so if you've got a Honda or Predator inverter generator today well this is kind of the grandfather of them this is a very old inverter uh they don't look like that anymore for sure typically you'd have a battery that sits down here this is a 24 volt model all these orange wires these are temperature sensors they're not original so that I'll be pulling out all of these so this is the positive post and it looks like it's missing its cam lock so that's why they've got the hose clamp there so this type of thing is really cool I used to use a lot of these when I was in and these were some of the favorite ones for us because they were just easy to start that single cylinder started easier than some of the other ones but the little 24 volt battery was Notorious for going flat on us so it always needed to be jumped at least in my unit there's a trade here and this tray and cable they would normally be used to secure an auxiliary fuel line now I don't have an auxiliary fuel line for this and it's kind of blocking me from getting down in there for some other things so I'm going to take out the fuel filter base and this tray and cable and that way I can get down in there where the fuel pump is and clean out better down in that area the first thing I like to do in a situation like this is just clean it up so I'm gonna remove all these old temperature sensors and anything that's not needed then I'll get in here with a shop vac and get these cobwebs and kind of a little brush and kind of brush and vacuum it all out next thing I like to do is make sure that all the old fluid is out of the unit so I'll tip it up with a block of wood under the back side and drain out the oil and it does have just a tiny bit of old nasty oil in it I also want to make sure the diesel tank is drained so I'm actually going to add a little bit of gasoline into the diesel tank slosh it around from side to side and then I'll drain that out make sure that there's no old diesel in there [Music] oh [Music] this is the oil drain Port I just took off the dust cap from it uh and these should be empty of any oil that's the oil drain port and I replaced that rubber hose and it leads to this uh that 90 degree and the bulkhead fitting and I'm draining out whatever little bit of oil was in there not very much just a tiny bit with 25 hours on it this is some break-in oil from John Deere and it's 10w30 this is about to be my first start of this mep831a I just put some fuel in I have my 12 or 24 volt jump pack attached there's no batteries batteries would usually sit in here this is the positive clamp which is on an insulated lug that's a how you're supposed to do it if you don't have the batteries installed inside I have a brand new filter this is the filter element but the housing and the bowl were original to the unit and I replaced all of the rubber lines all these rubber lines are all brand new it's going to be the first start so hopefully we do okay here so we have our procedures written right here on the lid I've got an outlet attached uh we're just going to be trying 120 volts right now this is a little switch that lets you switch between 120 and 240. right there right now it's on the 120 and 240 volt mode um which is fine I just know that this is a three kilowatt system and you don't want to try to put the full three kilowatts on one leg if you're in the 120 240 volt mode foreign well it's not starting so we'll turn on the DC turn this on and we get a low oil pressure well that shouldn't stop us from a battle short okay but we're not getting the fuel pump noise the electric fuel pump down here should run and we should hear it it should be pretty Audible and it's not moving the fuel and see when we do that we're not we're not even trying to crank well the pump is running so what I've done inside here I went through the TM and it turned out we were missing these uh diodes up here so I took those off of a parts machine [Music] so put the diodes on off of a park machine and now that electric fuel pump is running so we can actually hear the electric fuel pump that's this one down here and it's running and I watched this fuel bolt fill up we also hear the fan running on the inverter and I can feel the air blowing so there's a fan underneath it down under here there's a fan this one okay that's the other fuel pump right there that's for an auxiliary tank it's currently dry because it's not hooked up to anything and that's why it's so darn loud but you can add a fuel line here to an auxiliary tank and it will fill itself right now thinks that it's full I only put two gallons in so it shouldn't really be reading full so that might need replacing uh so let's see what we need to do here oh preheat on try to clear the fall oh did not start okay still have a failure to crank it doesn't sound like it's trying [Music] oh it's still not cranking but I noticed something else we are dripping some diesel fuel it looks like it's coming out of the right hand one unfortunately well I'm working my way through on this generator now it does run and it runs great when it's locked into the full throttle position which would be this locked up but I needed to do it automatically and keep its idle so I adjusted this Rod length yesterday now the instructions from Vermont say to adjust this Rod length until it's just before fully bottom so that is full bottom right there and so I'd say that's just before they don't actually give me a dimension but that's just before so next I'm going to start it up and then while it's running I have to adjust the speed potentiometer which is that little tiny screw down there so I'm going to get a little screwdriver and get ready for that part of it [Music] outside we saw that this generator had a real problem with surging at idle under load no problem at all but at idle it kept trying to shut off and then surge again now all that comes down to this Governor controller it controls the speed of the engine based on the load uh put on the engine I'm fortunate enough that there's somebody who's a real expert on these machines who lives in the same state as I do named Kurt now Kurt was kind enough to come on over here and take a look at this machine and he diagnosed it as a bad Governor controller now these Governor controllers are notorious for going bad that's pretty much the first thing that always goes bad on them you're not going to have the diesel engine fail it's usually this I purchased a replacement one from Kurt so yes he probably has a bias but he had some very good reasons as to why this Governor controllers not working and it's the fault so Kurt Ang actually designed and has made his very own Governor controller and I'll leave a link to his eBay store where you can purchase these and in the package comes with it a very detailed instruction it's front back so it shouldn't take me too long he includes a few labels so we gotta label all these wires take the wires off unscrew it screw the new one on and we should be good to go now this old Governor controller has four potentiometers down here at the bottom which all need to be adjusted in a very specific order now I went through that process and I still couldn't get it to idle well so that's one of the benefits of going to Curt's system Kurt has eliminated all the potentiometers now it does it all automatically and he pre-programs these so I can't wait to get the new one in and then try it out again hopefully we have no more surges so we have the different labels going across and they're going to correspond over here as you can see down here we have our four potentiometers and then we've got our labels a through J e has two on them so we're going to label it twice for e but all we got to do is label those so here's our first one I just cut it off and that's a [Music] foreign [Music] this will be our first test with the new governor controller we're going to want to pay attention to this arm now the bottom of this arm has a magnet on it that's supposed to be I think it was 5 16 of an inch away from the magnet at idle so when we first started up it should just sit there with no load at 5 16 of an inch off so we're going to check for that hopefully everything works all right we got our battery on it so here are the instructions from pert it says right there 5 16. it out together all right now we have no load on it I plugged in the charge burner now we're going to add the charge burner sounds great all right so right now we have 50 amps going in about 2 800 watts I'm going to take off the load [Music] you can hear that it just idled right down it did exactly what its job is all right that worked perfect awesome Kurt thank you so much for designing a governor controller that works this well thank you uh that just worked beautifully and I didn't have to fiddle with anything in a future video I hope to set up an auxiliary fuel tank so that I can do a proper fuel economy test and measure the kilowatt hours that we can put into the battery bank for a gallon of diesel that we consume right now I can't do that easily because with diesels we have a supply and a return line and I can't run the diesel empty thank you everybody so much for watching uh please like subscribe comment and share

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 402,164

Keywords: army, military, mil-spec, mep-831a, 831, yanmar, diesel, generator, aux, fuel, off grid, solar, home backup, 120/240, single cylinder, clone, L70, diesel generator, auction, fixing, fix up, running, kurt klopp, governor, speed control, diy

Id: pyzpOBTzKxI

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023