Guzzi wind-up

I spent a merry time last week re-winding my Quota's alternator. This
had a couple of false starts because I had problems with the new wire
shorting to the core, despite my winding PTFE tape around the bobbins.

Anyway, yesterday I sealed the windings with epoxy and reattached the
wires. Today I glued & bound the broken alloy retaining rings back
onto the core, then mounted it on the bike.

Well, Yee Haaw. It works. Not only that, but the regulator seems to
have survived. As a bonus it even seems to charge the battery.

Every silver lining has a cloud, and in this case the open-circuit
voltage of the alternator is a bit below what it should be - prolly
not enough turns on the bobbins. To compensate, though, the series
resistance is much,much lower than before, so the full-load voltage
drop should be lower *and* it ought to run cooler.

I may see if I can find an old automotive ammeter that I've got and
plumb that in: one of the things that really annoyed me was that when
the alternator failed, the charging light never came on - it works
fine now. The first clue I had that there was a problem was when the
tacho needle started drooping. The engine gave up a couple of minutes
later.

I need to decide now whether to brave commuting to work straight away,
or do a bit of bimbling first to check it all out and see how reliable
it is.

 

Cool.
Did you find winding details for it, or did you have to take notes as
you unwound the old one?

 

I sawed off the end loops of the old windings and counted the sawn-off
wire ends. Then I knocked the bundles out from between the bobbins
with a blind punch.

It was a little odd in that instead of one larger gauge wire, two
smaller wires were wound in parallel. I mimicked this when I rewound
it.

Trouble was, I kept losing count of the turns, hence I suspect the
slightly low output voltage!

 

Modern technology comes to the rescue. An mp3 player on record and
mutter the turns as you do them.

Anybody passing the open garage doors thinks you're just talking to
yourself, but that's not uncommon in garageland.

 

ITYM "swearing".

 

That's how it is here, yes.