12V generator ?'s

[effie_man]

I recently changed over to 12v on my '53 239 and i got a free 12 v generator that has sat for a number of years. It worked the last time it was on a motor. Its all hooked up and i took a base reading from my battery of 11.60V, with the motor running it slowly drops from that by .01V steadily about every 30s or so. When i throttle the motor up the reading jumps back to 11.60/11.61V until i let off and it drops back to where it was before i throttled and keeps dropping slowly. Im not very familiar with generators over alternators, so i am unsure if this is normal. Any suggestions? I would like to keep the nostalgia look of the generator over the modern look of an alt.

[Lead Head]

Generators will usually need more RPMs to out put the correct voltage, but I should let you know that 11.6 volts will kill a 12v battery rather quickly. You want 13.6-14.4 volts while runing to keep the battery healthy

[effie_man]

i figured as much just wanted some other opinions on the matter

[merlynr]

You may need to polarize the voltage regulator. Now if I could remember how to do that. I wonder how the brushes and commutator are?

[effie_man]

i think im gonna take it down to a company i know who can test it and find out for sure

[mtflat]

With the ignition OFF, you polarize the system by taking the field wire off the voltage regulator and touching it briefly to the batt terminal of the regulator.

Generators need to be turning 12-1500 rpms before they put out normal levels of juice. Below that it's a loss.

[effie_man]

k this is what i did for my generator. The one i spoke about was a chevy one i was trying to mod just so it worked. The generator turned out to be no good so i bought a set of 12v field coils and installed them on my 6v gen and it works great.