What to do with an extra lawn mower? Make a generator of course! I've owned the donor lawn mower since new, and the engine is in excellent shape. I bought a new GM 94 amp alternator, a 2500w continuous /5000w peak inverter which turned out to be a bit oversized for this application, a pulley and a new deep cycle battery. Since putting it together in 2006, I've used it several times and it works great. I get about an hour of run time per tank with a moderate load, and when it gets too late I can shut the engine off and get about another hour of run time from the battery. The switch on the left is a NO momentary contact switch, the alternator doesn't start making power until you energize the field, that's what this switch does. The switch on the right is the on/off switch for the engine. While the engine is warming up, the speed will hunt around a little, but levels out when warmed up. The governer was set to an engine speed of 3750rpm, which gave the alternator a speed of 3375rpm, I didn't want to set the lawn mower engine speed too high and shorten its life span. Looking at an RPM/output chart for this alternator showed this rpm gave me approximately a 75amp output, which is about 1100 watts at 14.7 volts. That is why the inverter is oversized. I did try running a larger diameter pulley on the lawn mower to spin the alternator faster, but a large enough load would stall the engine. The alternator brackets are made from an old bed frame, the main deck is two pieces of 3/4 ...
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