Hope some one can give me a little advice. I have a '47 Chevy coupe. It has a '54 235.. it's otherwise stock. The guy I got it from half-ass switched the car over to 12v. Most of the lights don't work, the gauges don't work. I have managed to get some of it straitened out. Since I have had it, it's had a battery drain issue. When I have it out and get it home, I disconnect the battery lead.. because in two days it will drop to 8v. So, never noticed it before, but today when I went to un hook it.. the battery is gurggling and looks like it was pushing some water out. Checked it with the meter and it's right about 12.8v. It's 13.8 at the battery with the engine running and about 14.5 at the alternator. So.. I guess my question is.. should I be concerned about the battery and what can I check? Regulator? Any help appreciated --Mike
Yes, you should be concerned!! You dont want the thing to blow up do you? check/replace either the regulator or the alt/gen or both and the battery.
A bubbling battery is giving off hydrogen gas= boom. I've had one blow up right next to me before. Talk about F'n loud! Never mind the acid raining down on you and the car, etc. Like Muttley said, replace the alt and regulator. The battery is probably ruined as well. The cables will corrode away where the acid touched the copper, so replace or trim those now.
Batteries do bubble while charging. It usually stops when the charging stops. This is why they are vented and the old maintenence types need water sometimes. If it is draining that fast, you have something staying on somewhere or a limited short. Pick up a simple 12v wiring how-to book and start checking the wiring for a ground fault or short. Also take your battery somewhere to be properly charged and tested. It may be suffering old age/abuse that aggravates the usual chemical processes that are going on or it may even have a short internally that is causing extra heat (more bubbles) and draining the charge.
those things scare the crap out of me and they smell like rotten eggs!! loose the battery and find out why its charging so much, most likely the regulator is bad. but if you keep that battery it WILL BLOW UP!!!!!
Bubbling when running or bubbling when not running? You made it sound like the car was OFF. If it bubbles when not running, you have quite a large drain there. Batteries will bubble some as they charge, but if it is excessive, it means that the battery is overcharging and will be either dry soon, or will be toast soon. At the stage where you are, I would say that the only good thing you can do is UNdo all the other guy's work and start over. You could spend countless hours on it and still keep discovering more things you don't like before you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You will likely spend fewer hours, and they will be less-frustrating hours by the way, if you start from the beginning where YOU know what steps have been taken all along the way. IT is quite possible that it is overcharging and that the alt/reg wiring will have to be unhooked and then re-hooked the correct way... if you are lucky it could be that simple. The first two things I would check right away would be that the regulator works correctly, and that it is taking it's voltage "sample" from the right place. I have seen a few regulators that would overcharge from the factory, and a few installations where the regulator didn't get the right signal so it didn't know what to do... Be very careful if anyone has used or, suggests using a diode somewhere in the wiring. Sometimes people do that to prevent run-on, or a number of other things. Remember that each diode has a voltage drop of .5 or .6 volts. That could very easily confuse a regulator depending on where along the wires they are found.... I have run into at least three cars with an undercharge/overcharge problem that was traced to that. There was even one car where the owner wired in a new ignition switch, converted to an alt, and electronic ignition, and made a few other mods. The guy wired it himself as if all wires were created equal. All wires were not created equal. He didn't realize that one of the wires coming off the switch was a resistor wire intended ONLY for use as the coil power wire. Without knowing any better, he used it for a different purpose and had strange things happen with the charging system. Another time a friend brought me his pickup to iron out a lighting problem. Most of the time everything was fine. Then the headlights would start tripping the breaker on-off-on-off only at certain times. Sometimes the clearance lights were bright, sometimes dim. Some accessories worked fine when others were off, then acted strange at other times. Very puzzling for quite a while. It turned out that a previous owner would keep adding things like stereo, amp, cb, lights etc by clipping in to anything he found that had a bit of voltage. We found a couple of accessories that were actually plugged into the wire that controlled the light brightness on the dashboard! We spent many hours unscrambling that mess. A 56 Chevy with a brand new wiring harness was brought to me because the turn signals were all screwey. One right and two left would flash, or the brake lights quit, or two fronts come on... After tracing that harness down, it turned out that the maker used the right colors, but not the same color coding as factory. We had to cut some wires and move them to different contacts to make the corrections. "Cut the blue with red stripe and move it where the purple was, take the yellow stripe and send it to the ..." My point is that you would probably be better off pulling out the wires and starting your own from the beginning so you know exactly where you are instead of trying to untangle someone elses tangled-up fishing lines.
Thanks for the replies.. yes.. car was off. I had just got it in the garage and poped the hood when I noticed it making the noise. I thought I should be a little concerned. I have never had any kind of electrical issues with any of the cars I've had.. so this is all new. The battery is less than a year old.. but there are wires dangling everywhere and I probably do need to just get a new harness and start over. There is no radio, the only things needing power are the engine and the lights.
Sounds to me like you should be totally changing over ALL your wiring. Sounds to me like a ragtag mess of wires. Do the job right and gets yourself a kit and re-wire it.
14.5 volts is a healthy normal reading. But, at idle that may not be accurate. Bring the rpms up and see where it goes. I don't like to see much past 15, even that is a little high. If your battery is boiling at 14.5(running) then you may have a shorted cell in the battery. In which case it would read around 11.5(not running) after a little cool down. Check all your grounds. Is it internal regulated? Probably a one wire Delco. To find the drain; dissconnect the -batt. terminal. Put a 12v test light in, hook one end to the negative battery post and one to the cable. A drain will light it up. Start by disconection fuses one by one. If there was a drain on any particular circuit then the light would go out. Next I usually disconnect the hot lead off the alternator. Those internal regulators can go bad and stay fielded, still charge ok but drain the battery.If you still haven't found the drain just start unhooking any other posative connectors or leads. When the light goes out you have found it. I leave each circuit unhooked as I go, then connect them back one by one in the same order I disconnected them. That way if there was 2 drains you will find it. If there is more than 2 it takes a lot more fiddling, leave them all disconnected after the light has went out and connect then disconnect each circuit. My best guess is the internal regulator is fielded but I wouldn't just throw an alternator at it without testing it.
What type alternator do you have? 1 wire or 3? You may need an idiot light or diode to prevent overcharging. Another thing to check is whether any AC is detected at the battery when the car is running. If so you probably have a bad rectifier.
haven't had much time to try and figure this out. I looked at the regulator today and just wanted to see if I could find one. It doesn't seem to be the right one.. the few part sources I looked at.. do not have one that looks like this. It'a Delco Remy.. 507 12 v.. but it has 4 connectors... the ones I have found have 3. Just wondering, since it seems like they threw this car together, that this is the wrong regulator.. and if I need to replace it, do I just use one for a '54 since that's what the engine is?
One for the 54 will NOT work as 1 it is 6volt and 2 for a generator. Get one for a Chevy car/truck from the 65-70 era and you will be in biz. With what you said your voltage was your battery may have a internal problem get it checked also.
duh.. I shoulda known that.. haven't been able to do much tinkerin' lately. Should the alternator and the regulator both have voltage with the key off? It's showing about 14 on each
Ok with a 3 wire only the large output wire that goes to the battery should be hot with the key off. Neither of the small ones should have power key off, if you do that is most likely your drain.And that would indicate a bad voltage regulator I would think.
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