What's a good circuit to add an hour meter to?

   / What's a good circuit to add an hour meter to? #11  
as an alternative, there should be a hole in the flywheel housing that is threaded for a mag p/u.... Magnetic Pickup... typically, its a 2 wire pickup that has no moving parts, but a small magnet in the end... as the teeth of the flywheel pass infront of the magnet, it creates a small electrical signal... run the wires to a standard hour meter and you are done...
diesel powered chippers, stump grinders..etc... all use this simple setup to run the auto-feed features... same mag pickup that is used to power a tachometer.
 
   / What's a good circuit to add an hour meter to? #12  
That vibration hour meter suggested by rayk sounds like a good idea. I have several engines (eg. lawn tractor, chipper, splitter, lawnmower, generator etc) where I should be monitoring the usage time. The above are all gas engines but I think that I'd rather go with a vibration activated meter than a spark wire.

I found the site suggested by rayk. It's
Search results for "vibration hour meter" - Allied Electronics

On my case tractor I have two hour meters and they read differently. I think that it's a situation similar to the one in my plane. One hour meter is mechanically driven on the tach and it assumes that the engine is operating at 2350 rpm. So if I run at a faster rpm, like 2500 rpm, for one hour the tach hour meter will read maybe 1.1 hours of use. The other hour meter is electrically driven. So if I'm idling it will still register time usage.
 
   / What's a good circuit to add an hour meter to?
  • Thread Starter
#13  
The one negative of my new hour meter (except for the negative ground wire - HA) is that is will only measure hours of run time, regardless of RPM. I may be going 1,000 or I may be going 3,000 (just picking numbers here), and it will still count an hour as an hour. But I still think it's going to be far better than just a "seat of the pants" guess as to how many hours I've rolled up between PM checks.

Thanks for the advice on the vibration hour meter. I might look into that for some other applications.
 

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