Hi JAY.

10-Jan-03 09:31:00, JAY EMRIE wrote to JASEN BETTS


 JB>> Rainly night city driving does it to me, wipers and two headlights
 JB>> while spendind most of my time at idling the motor  while at traffic
 JB>> lights....

 JB>> I drive round in a lower gear, and apply the park brake and run the
 JB>> motor a little faster when stopped... seems to solve it for me.

 JE> You haven't solved a cotton picking thing. You have just
 JE> circumvented the problem! Why not actually FIX the problem
 JE> by replacing the alternator or finding the root cause of the
 JE> problem?

I don't drive much at night anyway, or visit the city often, and the
weather is mostly fine.

I've has the car for 4 years and this problem has presented itself twice
haviong a manual transmission and few flat streets in brisbane city it's
not a big problem if a warm motor stalls with a flat battery.

The car is 10 years old, when I got it it had the external regulator, I
replaced altenator with a used one when the first one's bearings failed
and the internal reglator on that one lasted about 6 months.

The problem may be with the internal regulator not being designed for
this climate,

the external regulator keeps the battery charged, and a fault is indicated
diagnosed if the battery voltage drops to 12v or lower with the engine
running at a moderate speed.

I've considered making a regulator that uses the altyenators auxilliary
half-bridge to power the field but I haven't quite figured out how I should
do that.


 This is what it had

          instrumentation fuse
          .
          .       . . . Altenator warning lamp
          .      .
          .  |  .           . diode to stop "afterglow" in the lamp
   ign+   .  |  .         .'
   ------oxo-+-(X)-----|>|-----.   _____\
                               |  ||~~T~/ to bat+
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .|. ||. | . .
                               |  ||  |
             .------------|>|--|  ||  |
    ___|\|__ 1 __|\|___________|__||  |
   ||~~|/|~~~~~~~|/|~~||~~~~~~~|~~~   `- sense wire to regulator
   ||                 ||       |
   ||         .-------||--|>|--+--- power wire to regulator
   ||__|\|__ 2 __|\|__||       |
   ||~~|/|~~~~~~~|/|~~||       |
   ||                 ||       |
   ||         .-------||--|>|--'
   ||__|\|__ 3 __|\|__||    small rectifier with 1A diodes
   ||~~|/|~~~~~~~|/|~~~
   ||
 __||___ main rectifier with chunky 50A (I guess) diodes
///////
        1 2 3 are connections to altenator the stator windings.

What I've got presently uses a relay to switch in a three-terminal generic
external regulator  (one terminal "B" gets the battery voltage
via the relay
the other "D" goes to the field terminal of the altenetor (the other
terminal is bolted to thr chassis)

   -=> Bye <=-

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