MEP-002A Governor

[Boonies]

Hi, I wanted to post this information for other users. Don't know if it will be useful for anybody or not. In June 2021 the gear on the oil pump on my MEP-002A sheared off. The only thing that got damaged was the gear cover plate and the oil pump. I got some really good help here on the Steel Soldiers. I got a new oil pump and installed it and everything was fine. Then I saw a post from Blade on this forum about his issue with the governor in an MEP-003A. He had the pin that is mounted on the governor/gear/oil pump cover come out and damage his gear set. Anyway, my generator ran fine for a while after the oil pump fix. Then the governor started acting up. It would run great for a while and then it would start "hunting" where the frequency/RPM would be erratic. I spent many hours on many different occasions trying to adjust the governor. It didn't seem right to me that it was so difficult to adjust. I would get it running pretty good then all of sudden it would get erratic again. It never occurred to me to ask for help. I just thought it was a difficult adjustment. The generator ran OK and the frequency variations didn't seem cause any real problems so I sort of got used to it. Every so often I would go in and attempt to adjust the governor again but I was never able to eliminate the "hunting". I actually used it like that for about 2 years or so. A while back I got another MEP-002A. The governor was really good and did just what anybody would expect. I fiddled around with it someand found that it was not difficult or finicky to adjust at all. It was robust and there was good range of adjustment that would work. I decided to go into the older generator and find out what was wrong. I pulled the fan and the gear/governor cover and what I found is the pin that Blade had difficulty with had sheared off. It did not come loose like his, it was sheared off right at the edge of the aluminum casting. The mystery and astounding part about this is that the pin is gone. It did not go into any of the gears and it was not laying at the bottom of the cover. It is completely gone. The only thing I can imagine is that somehow is got into the oil pan. I cannot believe that really happened, but where else could it be? There is very little clearance under that cover plate and the only openings into the oil pan are below the gears. How could that pin shear off and get through all those tight places and end up in the oil pan? Maybe some day I will have need to remove the oil pan and find it there? The other generator I got has some problems that I won't go into now so what I decided to do is take the cover plate that still has the governor pin off of the newer generator and put on the old one. It worked!! It took about 3 to 5 minutes to get the governor adjust and the generator runs great with no "hunting" at all even with large load changes. I have only run the generator about 100 hours since the fix, but it would never go for more than an hour or so without getting erratic.