Powering up the loader

Just as an aside to alternators on equipment, bro in law inherited an old smooth face drawn vibrating Coates roller to knock the humps and bumps off his paddocks.Has an old 4 cylinder air cooled Lister and would say it had originally been fitted with a generator. Somewhere along the line someone or other had grafted a common old Bosch alternator off maybe a Holden, Ford, Valiant whatever, on it and modified the brackets. Must have been an early type as had part of the voltage regulator in a seperate enclosure. His mate had half a dozen later type alternators with the built in regulators kicking around and only having the three wires to contend with, deemed it a good idea to upgrade. Changed at least four of them out declaring they were stuffed or burnt out. I suggested to him that the ind in should have a low wattage "trigger" or pilot lamp to excite it, said they had already tried wiring it through the genny charging lamp, wouldn't work, must be stuffed. Came back to me a week or so later and admitted I was right, they had got the auto sparky out and $80 odd later had sorted it out. Only reason I twigged is because I had the same sort of thing here at home, tried half a dozen different value LED pilot lights, differing amp or watt globes. Found out more or less by accident bridged a 1 watt festoon across the input wire to the alternator ind and away she went, as soon as she worked up enough juice, the festoon went out. So, you live and learn, some of us are just lucky enough to arrive at the desination by accident!

Hi,

I would say you don't need an external regulator because the label says it has an I.C.(Intergrated Circuit) Regulator built in. In my vehicles which use Lucas alternators mostly, I run a heavy wire to B(for battery) and a wire from L back to the Light on the dash. And forget about R.

This is just a guess but R maybe for a regulated feed to handle something like Smiths gauges that like a constant 10v because 12.6-14.4v makes them read to high or inconsistently. Once you have it running, stick a volt meter on R and see if it is a constant value.

Terry

Must be why a lot of that yank stuff that ran Stewart-Warner gauges had a ballast resistor built into the gauge clusters as in Jeep

That thing on the Stewart Warner gauges is a regulator. It has a bimetal to operate the contact. You don't notice the gauges move, but if any lights run off it you will notice them pulsing. They run about 5 volts. (Average over time due to contact opening and closing).

Jarrod.

thank you all, I am leaning along Terrys idea, inbuilt reg, and using Langs remarkable collection of data, R is ignition and L is indicator, it does not mention B but even I can tell that is the battery connection. So once the baby sitting duties are over, (grandad is a dab hand at it on his own) the much talked about heat and then probably christmas as well, I will have a crack at making it go.

Thanks.

I am about to try and get a better charge out of my voltage regulator on the David Brown. The generator puts out enough charge of around 12.9v from memory but 11.9v from the regulator. My regulator can be adjusted and I just received a PDF on Lucas regulators and how to adjust them and for test the output of the generator.
It has 31 pages and is so detailed and so soon I will follow the proceedure and see how I go.
If anyone wants a copy of thePDF send me a PM with email and I will send it on.

Assuming clean contacts, it may have a bad connection internally - mine did. It was easy to trace with a test light. There were actually two bad connections in series, so I soldered a wire to bypass the lot.
Having said that, if it's a Lucas RB108, they're not expensive.

Best of luck and do keep us updated. I, at least, enjoy it!

Jarrod.

Yeah, mine is a Lucas RB108 but never was originally. Sometimes I just like to play and learn and once I've really stuffed it up, buy another one. :lol: