Well, BillF moved and since he doesn't have a spot at his new place for this - it's here now. It has hardly any running hours on it - it's mostly been in a shed and shows it. It was horribly mis-adjusted, and I'm working through that after cleaning the mouse nests out of things and so forth. But here it is going, and working well, even before I'm really going on getting it just right. This is a frigging tank for an 8hp motor... I've tested it to a little over 4kw so far and it gets louder, but doesn't seem to be anywhere near what it'll do at that point - I only have so much ability to load such a thing anyway.
When I got it, it was adjusted such that the generator was 72 hz, and the valve lash something over 60 mils. I got that down to around 61 hz no load, and around 30 mils and heated it up some at light load (about half a kw). The lash increases with heat - nice to know - so I can go tighter. For whatever reason, this also makes it shake a lot less than it did at first. I will probably be doing some mods, as in adding a thermostat, and perhaps a little arduino trickery to keep it running at top efficiency.
While I'm not really a fan of diesel (that smell, yuck) perhaps I can add an exhaust stack and larger muffler to both quiet it down and push the fumes out to where I don't smell them. It's actually a lot cleaner burning than your average automotive diesel idling in the general store parking lot already - but you guys know me, it ain't perfect yet...so I'm going for at least "a whole lot better" with this. Valuable hot spare/backup to the rest of the power systems around here. This thing really sips the fuel - I tried it at heavy load earlier while testing the overactive cooling system - and couldn't see any drop in the tiny fuel tank after half an hour. Not bad. I'll get real numbers, but it's obviously in the "hey, that's real nice" range already.