[Farmall] Farmall 504 diesel engine

[RogerKIWI at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/20/05 3:33:52 AM, vinsond at voyager.net writes:


> Just out of curiousity, does anybody know why the balancer wasn't used
> on the gasoline engine?  My loose and pretty un-schooled understanding
> is that four-cylinder engines are inherently unbalanced at higher RPMs
> due to the differing travel distance of the connecting rods on the
> upstroke vs downstroke, or something like that, while six-cylinder
> engines are inherently balanced.  But as I think about it, it seems the
> connecting rod physics would be the same regardless of number of
> cylinders.  And either way, assuming the diesel and gas engines are both
> four-cylinder, I'd have thought they'd both have an equal need for a
> balancer.
> 
I don't "know", but my guess is it's because the parts in a diesel engine 
typically are heavier, to withstand the higher loads placed on them, so the 
unbalanced forces are potentially greater due to this higher mass of the parts.

I've not seen inside an IH diesel engine, but do remember the balancers that 
FIAT used in the crankcase of their engines with two counter-rotating weights 
that spun at twice the crank speed. These are to cancel out some of the 
unbalanced forces that are inside a 4 (or 3) cylinder engine.

Quite a few car engines now incorporate balance shafts too it seems from 
searching Google for

4 cylinder engine balance

Cheers

Roger