Shop Stuff

I have one of these:

It is a turf vacuum that picks up anything from cigarette butts to pop cans or, supposedly, even beer bottles.  The one I have is one that we were paid to remove from a customer's site.  It had a blown engine (they run on a 5 HP lawnmower engine) and flat tires.  Other than that it was in good shape.  I brought it home, did some research and found that they retail for anywhere from $1,700 to $2,500 and decided to renovate it.  

I dismantled it to make sure everything worked except the engine and after confirming that it would work with a new engine, I ordered a 6.5 HP engine from Harbor Freight which arrived today and I started the install process tonight.  

Unfortunately, since the HF engine is a generic one, there are a few things that are requiring me to make some modifications.  The biggest difficulty was that the muffler on the new engine was placed about an inch too far to the front of the engine which meant that it would interfere with the big suction fan chamber thing on the front of the vacuum.

In this image, you can see the flange on the muffler pipe is totally NOT going to meet up with the manifold area where it is supposed to bolt on (flange and manifold areas circled for your convenience)

I was pretty bummed about this not fitting, but it didn't take me long to work up the courage to really "tear into" this project.  It required courage because I had to break out the cutting wheel and chop the BRAND NEW muffler in half so I could weld the piping into a form that would allow the muffler to fit.  The problem was I didn't have any little tubing  that would match the muffler pipe that I could use to make the modification...

...then I remembered this old bike we have that the kids left in the driveway and had been subsequently run over.  I went out to check and, yep, sho nuff, the handlebars looked like they would be just right.  So I dismantled this:

And turned this:

Into this:

You can see I just chopped the muffler pipe in half and cut a section of the prebent pipe out of the handlebar.  I then welded the muffler pipe flange onto the section of pipe to get this:

Then after measuring it and trimming it and remeasuring it over and over again, I finally got it to where I felt it was in the right form to turn it into this:

Which, of course, leads to this:

It's not yet bolted on, but you can see that the muffler pipe flange is now in a position where it can be bolted onto the engine block while it moves the muffler over enough that everything fits.  Yeah!  

I didn't have time to finish a few tiny modifications to move the gas tank over a 1/4 inch tonight and the muffler was too hot (from welding) to install and it is too late, so this is where I left it for the night:

The motor is installed on the base and bolted down, the front vacuum chamber, muffler and gas tank are removed.