steve frasier said:
Jeff, toss out the above comment
After owning a spit fire to a
Vortex to most things in between, for performance (Residential to commercial) I wouldn't want to be without a #5 blower
Don't you also lose a little on a longer hose run with a tri lobe blower? My 427
BOXXER didn't really compare to the 450 MAXX on a longer hose run. At least by sound it didn't
How much does the motor have a lot to do with it, torque wise. To me I would rather have an inline 3 cylinder motor compared to briggs n stratton
Steve,
I would like to say a couple of things about blower performances. A Gardner Denver 5M produces 525 CFM. The blower we are using, the 408, at the rpm of 3600 where we run it, is 550 CFM. Most all blowers relieve at the same negative pressure of 15 – 16 inches of mercury. So the main thing you need to look at is the performance of the blower, regardless what number it is. With the blower we use, if you just put it on a table next to a standard blower, it is obvious that the one we are using is a much heavier built blower. The C4 at full negative pressure drops less than 70 rpm. Not having the spec book in front of me, I would say that it would probably match the 5M at that point. You have to remember, though, when you take the 5M and load it to full negative pressure, it is going to drop too.
With the C4, the top priority is reliability, the second thing is available common parts. Serviceability, of the components is also a priority and as you can see, the components are easy to access. Now I would like to say something about the air cooled engine versus a water cooled inline four. As you know, Steve, Judson is capable of building any machine that has ever been produced, from any slide-in heat exchanger to the
Vortex and the
Aerotech. All we have to do is just order the parts and begin building them. The reason we like to stay with an air cooled engine is the same reason the small aircraft industry likes to stay with air cooled engines; reliability. If you are a private pilot and fly a single engine airplane, your engine, darned-well better be reliable. The next thing we like about the air-cooled twins is that any lawn mower shop can get parts and service them. There are probably about 80,000 lawn mower shops in America. Another thing good about the twin is replacement cost. You can buy maybe about 3 of the twins for the price of one four cylinder inline. Now I’m not saying the four cylinder inlines are not good engines, but Judson feels the additional money that is being spent on that engine could be spent on other components like a large stainless steel recovery tank, plus lowering the purchase price of the machine. Another good thing about the twins is that they only burn 1.6 gallons pr hour under full load.
Another feature about the C4 that I don’t think a lot of people realize is that it will maintain 240 degrees on a Greenhorn wand at a propane burn of .9 gallons pr hour under commercial conditions and only .5 under residential conditions. When designing a truckmount there is always a give and take; always. For instance, if I was trying to design a slide-in heat exchanger to match the performance of the C4, I would have to have an extremely large engine. Then I would have to have an extremely large blower to load the extremely large engine to produce the BTU’s needed to produce the heat. Now, these additional BTU’s I’m trying to get, are being produced by gasoline consumption. So now I have a unit consuming a lot of fuel that has extremely expensive parts on it just to make heat. Then we would have to get some heat off the blower, but then the fun begins. We have to control this heat somehow. That is when all the apparatus, mechanisms, and devices come into play. They must be there to control it. So as you can see to gain my so-called FREE heat, it is costing me more to produce the machine, costing me more to operate the machine, and I have DEFINITELY given up reliability, and I have definitely given up common local parts that and I am having to rely on proprietary parts; all that just to replace the Little Giant heater. Even in Jeff Woods’ case, he still had to buy a Little Giant heater to add to his inline four cylinder unit to maintain heat on Greenie’s wand.
So, that is the tradeoff to go full heat exchange. Now what is the tradeoff to go with a C4? The only thing I can think of is that now you have the hassle of buying propane, but it may not be as big a hassle as you think. A lot of guys running our units have their own fill bottles at their home. These are not the big bottles you see that have electric pumps that you might see at a commercial fill station. These are smaller bottles similar to what you see when a home is being heated with LP gas. The gas company comes and refills the bottle once per month and you don’t have to pay road tax, so you are purchasing at a lower price. These systems do not require electric pumps to fill, they just gravity feed from one tank to the other and they take slightly longer to fill.
Judson has TNT units that are still in service in excess of 25 years; a lot of them. The operators simply replaced engines and pumps as they wore out like replacing tires and brakes on a car. I see no reason the C4 will not have the same service record as the TNT. There is not much difference; just larger components. Plus, the neatest thing about buying a Judson truckmount regardless of the units is that you will have me as support unlike my competitors who take full advantage of someone who is down and out.
