Technical A Kid's First Project: 1957 Fairlane 500 Town Victoria.

the spot before the bearing? i wire brushed the backing plate clean, as it was coated in filth.

 

Take a look at YouTube on “turning an armature”. It’ll make more sense

 

Clean up the commutator as best as you can with sandpaper or emery cloth before installing the new brushes.
If the bearings have rubber seals pop them off and grease the bearings.

 

ahh i see, after looking at it a bit more, i need to pull the front half of the generator off aswell, i dont have a wrench that can fit on it, I might be able to steal one from my dad.
the commutator looks to be in decent shape, just dirty.

 

You should use an impact gun with a socket to get the pulley off/

 

that might be why the biggest wrench i have wouldnt fit then. and its an inch! must be an inch and a half or so. thanks for the advice.

 

you try 15/16 and it didn't fit?

 

turns out once you remove a massive layer of crud a 15/16 does infact fit. should be easy now.

 

this baby is worn out.
this might need a tad more than emery cloth...

 

That com needs to be turned, do you know anyone with a lathe? One it’s turned it will also need to be undercut. Is there an auto electric rebuilder anywhere close to you where you could take it to be turned. If not clean it up the best you can and save for a rebuilt generator.
I tried to post a video of under cutting but it wouldn’t post so I took two screenshots from it to post. This is the armature after turning the comm, then it’s undercut and sanded smooth.

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/1IOfpdo5O1k?feature=share
Undercutting video short.
You can also clean the phenolic from between the bars with a hack saw blade but it takes forever, also no copper can touch from one bar to the other as that causes a short.

 

i cleaned it up a little, it could be worse
there was a generator/alternator shop up the road when my dad was my age, but its been closed for a long time. something i really need to have for my future shop is a lathe

its better than it was, but not where it needs to be.
Maybe the kids at KCCC machine shop clasd could do it? not sure if i trust them to learn on my parts

 

Cool!
I wonder how one of those pneumatic hacksaws would work?

We don’t have an auto-electric shop in town anymore. The guy who had it was priceless. I took a starter into him and he said the coils were bad, handed me a set for cheap in my mind, he said “if you can pull the starter you can replace these”. I did, but the starter still didn’t work. When I brought back to him he said “leave it here”. Came back a few hours later, starter was all painted up and working like a champ.
I asked what I owed. He said “let’s go a few doors down, buy me a beer”.
He’d been there for as long as I could recall. I guess the place was paid off and the shop is where he’d rather be doing nothing, than sitting on a couch.

 

Remember you’re learning too. They are supervised and I’m sure they would do a good turn on it. Yours cleaned up better than I thought and will get you by for now with new brushes.

 

i accidentally messed up the back of the bearing (the rubber bit) when i was pulling it off, will it be fine?
also what about the dirt/filth inside the generator housing? do i worry about it or leave it be?

 

It’s phenolic (the hard insulation between the armature bars on the commutator) all you do is take a regular hacksaw blade and handle then run it between the bars to “undercut “ the insulation between the bars.

 

Leave it alone, as my dad always told me “son ya gotta learn when to leave well enough
alone” if you try to clean it out you will probably ruin the paper wrap on the field coils,
Then you’re screwed. So CAT leave well enough alone….hey that was kinda fun?

 

For what you’re doing the bearing will be fine, see the fun quote in the previous post
You are learning and doing fine.

 

It's funny how most people i meet online (other than here) rather than even trying to rebuild or fix things themselves, they just send it off and have a replacement, put a modern part on it, etc. and think its strange how i'd even bother to replace the brushes on a 66 year old generator. assuming this is the original, and not a replacement thats still older than me by a wide margin.

something funnier i just realized is that technically i'm following the recycling motto "reduce, reuse, recycle".

 

Or you can go to Napa and just get a new bearing to replace the one with the screwed up seal.

 

the seal popped back in place luckily, so its not an issue anymore. but i finished up my harness and put it back how it would have been routed factory

 

also, i "fixed" my ground strap. it'll work good enough.

 

For me, time was money for many years. I had 3 electrical shops local I used for decades. One was "in town", I used them from 1975 to around 1984 when they closed. Then a real old Dutchman between 1978 to 1986 when I could wait a few days. I never learned what happened to him. He had a large shop behind his house with a coal stove to heat it. He did a lot of boat work. The last is someone my buddy went to HS with, the shop has that old school vibe to it. But these guys are no spring chickens either.

 

curiosity has gotten the better of me.
The tool used for the undercut, appears to be on a fixture of some sorts. Is it just lined up by eye? And how deep is the undercut, I assume just to separate material from bar to bar when it’s turned?

Dang I gotta buy a book

Thanks for the education.

 

I learned how to do starters in auto school... circa 1974. Ask someone today what a "growler" is. You will hear crickets.

 

I’ve been told about them, but have never seen one in use.
I’d imagine they were a staple in an auto-electric shop.

 

arent generators pretty much reversed starters?

i wonder if there were any cars in the past that used the starter to generate power

 

Yes, Dodge early on comes to mind. I’m sure others did too. Heck I have an old Wards riding mower that had it as well.

 

Some of the early Cub Cadet yard tractors used a generator for a starter, belt driven at that!

 

When I closed the auto electric side of the business after the sale of the building we were in for 62 years I did keep and move some stuff to my home shop where I now run the speedometer side of the business. Lathe and armature under-cutter definitely came with me. The undercutting set up was made by Tru-cut,
they made free standing units and the unit I have that works on your existing lathe.
It’s basically a Daton heater motor adapted to run a mini circular saw blade. It has height and depth adjustments to dial in the depth of your under-cut. I think we paid around $800 for this one back in the early 90’s, a lot of money but when you are doing it for a living it cuts down on labor and just makes sense.
I guess I could have offered to turn and under-cut Cats armature but I got rid of all of my armature growlers and would have had no way to check the armature for grounds or shorts when finished. I dug it out after looking at Cats thread this morning and set it up for pics.