Chicago Electric Generator (Part 1) - No Power

hey guys welcome back so today working on this 5500 watt Chicago electric generator this one came to me from a subscriber he gave it to me and the story I'm told is that a friend gave it to him after it stopped making power and it's still not making power so yeah a generator that doesn't make Power really doesn't serve much purpose so hopefully I can get that issue sorted out and if I do there are a lot of other things that need to be dealt with I guess first off this generator is only 11 years old you can tell just by looking at it that has been stored Outdoors for quite some time the paint is pretty faded a lot of the hardware has rust on it the tank there's a bad smell coming from it and if you look on the underside of the cap that's a big clue that the fuel is bad and yeah if you look in there you can see bad fuel maybe a bit of water and definitely some Rust so that is not a good situation this here is the tank vent it's supposed to be installed right there but it looks like the rubber bushing is missing and someone already made an attempt to fix that so that we'll have to deal with and looking at the front here there's a number of things that stand out you know I guess first off these switches do not look Factory the original switch most likely would have been a key for the electric start and that's been replaced by a push button and a toggle switch most likely to kill spark down here is probably the most concerning thing is a cap that's on a threaded pipe that was put in the place of the oil dipstick and this cap it looks like just a cap that you'd see on like an oil bottle and it doesn't even thread on here properly so that definitely needs to be dealt with before trying to start the engine on the engine side you know things look pretty normal we have an engine that turns over freely and has good compression the throttle although it looks rusted it does move so that's good assuming it starts it should have control of the engine speed and I doubt it's going to start given what's in the tank so that carburetor I'm sure has to be gone through you know this side looks to be pretty complete don't see any issues here and of course the power head side that is the big issue so I'm going to break out the multimeter we'll check a few things see if there's any red flags and go from there I'm going to start by doing the easy thing which is just testing the resistance of leg 1 and leg two this is a 240 volt generator which means it has two 120 volt circuits that when they're wired together in series will produce 240 volts so you want to check both of them to make sure they are consistent in the ohms reading now this one I don't know the exact reading that it should be but usually on Honda clones of this size I see between 0.2 and 0.5 ohms so let's see what this one is and before testing set your multimeter to ohms and touch the leads together to see what the resistance is of your leads in this case the resistance is 0.1 ohms but some meters it's quite a bit higher so you want to keep that in mind because the values we're measuring are pretty low and if your meter is starting at 0.6 ohms then any reading you take is going to be above kind of that reject of 0.5 ohms so once you know what that value is you can subtract that from any reading you get to get the True Value to do these tests I like using the 240 volt outlet but you could use the 120 Outlets you just need to know which one is leg one and which one is leg two but on this Outlet it's pretty easy to make that determination because the one with this tab that's the ground opposite is neutral then you have leg one and leg two so if I put one of the probes in the neutral I can then test the other two legs and hopefully it's 0.5 ohms or less so we're at 0.5 ohms that is a little high but when you subtract the 0.1 we're now at 0.3.4 so that seems good let's check the other leg we're at 0.5 0.4 subtract the 0.1 we're at 0.3.4 again which is good so they are consistent and now if you check between leg 1 and leg two you should see twice the value in this case it's somewhere going to be somewhere around 0.6 to 0.7 and we're at 0.8 you subtract the point one we're at 0.7 so yeah no red flags here the stator seems to be good at least it's not open circuit or very high resistance but to dig any further we need to pull the end cover off that power head foreign so far so good from what I can see the lacing looks good don't see any burnt wires so no obvious sign of a problem here let's get the AVR with the automatic voltage regulator out of the way and that'll give a better view of the stator I can tell someone's definitely been in here because this is usually zip tied out of the way and these neutral wires are usually connected right here so it is a little bit odd but I don't see anything wrong yeah the stator looks good copper color is good lacing is not broken I don't see any hot spots or anything burned through so visually There's No Smoking Gun here so I am going to need the multimeter to test each winding to make sure it's good but before I can do that I need to finish isolating the winding so I need to unplug this and also disconnect these wires right here and then we can get an accurate test of everything in this power head I will say all those nuts were quite loose I'm going to do a very similar test I'm just checking the ohms of the different windings here and just to get your bearings there are four wires coming out of the stator these are sleeved together the blue and the red and then you have this darker red and white so leg one and leg two are those sets of wires we have this is most likely a center-tapped winding providing power to either the charging system or maybe the fuel solenoid so we'll double check that winding as well here's another winding that did go to the bridge rectifier to make DC voltage and this one went to the AVR the blue wires are what Supply power to the AVR and the yellow and the white is what the AVR uses to monitor the output and make adjustments based on that so let's just start with the main windings again I'm gonna put the Probe on the white wire and I'm going to check it to ground I want to make sure there's no connection to ground and there's not so there's no ground fault there the red wire is part of the same winding we'll skip that let's go to Blue check that to ground we have a connection to ground so let's just be sure I'm going to pull the blue off interesting no connection to ground so this red wire was kind of close to hitting other things so maybe that's what it was but let's just put this back we'll double check it again like that okay there's no connection to ground so that's good it looks like the two main circuits are good let's check the one of the blue wires to ground actually we'll check between the blue wires first make sure that's good should be around 1.5 ohms plus or minus a bit and we're at Point well 2.3 seems a little high but that might be okay on this generator no connection to ground and the yellow and white usually go back to one of the main legs which it does and we've already tested that so we know it's good and usually the other wire goes to the other leg or sometimes the same leg in this case it's the same so yeah I don't think we have an issue there we already checked that to ground blue I don't think we checked that to ground did we no connection to ground and between the brown wires I'm guessing that we're going to see a value going through the center tap so we got 0.6 so now if I check it to the black it's probably about half that and it is check it to the other Brown it should be about the same it is we'll check it to ground no issue there so the main winding seems good the AVR winding this which provides power probably to the fuel solenoid and this is the DC circuit there's actually DC output on the front of this generator so it might be used there I don't know what the resistance should be on this but it's coming in at 0.3 let's check it to ground no issues there so this is actually good everything seems reasonable none of the insulation has failed to ground potentially the insulation could have failed and not to ground but to kind of adjacent coils but we'll check that in a minute but first I'm going to check the rotor by putting these leads on the slip rings and see what that comes in at usually it's between 40 and 70 ohms but it varies a bit depending upon how dirty the slip rings are so let's see what we get so usually I see between 40 and 70 ohms on the slip rings and in this case we're at 34 ohms so that is a little bit low might be okay for this generator but it is a little low let's check it to ground and there is a 3.3 million Ohm connection to ground and climbing so that is questionable I guess the Ohms on the slip rings they're a little low there shouldn't be a connection to ground and there is one not a great one I think the rotor would still work like this so maybe there's a bit of moisture in there maybe it's some carbon dust creating that ground I'm not sure but that so far is the only thing suspicious here I'm gonna check each of these windings to each other so leg one to leg two there should be no connection there's not do it to the DPE winding good no connection a center tap on this winding which is the black no connection and this green winding which is the main DC out on the front panel no connection so that's good we'll check it now from leg two the DPE no connection no connection and no connection so it's looking promising do DPE looks good good yeah so I would say actually this stator 100 is good the rotor a bit of a question mark but based on the reading even at three million ohms to ground I would expect it to power up so I say I put all these wires back the way they were fixed that oil fill and get this thing started okay I'm going to leave it like this everything's secured enough to test it but before I do that I need to sort out that oil situation all right hopefully this pipe wasn't epoxied in or something stupid like that no it's turning foreign thread and there's not a lot of oil in there I do see oil though but it's definitely on the low side so we'll top that off but first let's just make sure I have a dipstick that fits this is from one of those blown up predators I made a video on a while ago I got three predators two were blown but the oil fill cap fits perfectly so yeah let's top that off and then I'm going to try to start it not with the gas in the tank I'll use an external tank and hopefully that carb can still do something the fuel valve was off so there is a chance this car might be clean and the drain bolt was actually fairly loose so I am not the first one to take that off okay good looks like it was stored without fuel in the carburetor so that is a good sign but I am going to let it drip a bit I do smell really bad fuel dripping out of there so once that's empty I'm just going to pull the line going to the tank connect it to external fuel supply and we'll give it a try it's been dripping for a while why do I have a feeling this is plugged yep all right I take that back there was fuel in the carburetor and just the drain was clogged which is not a good sign foreign wow thank you to the subscriber who sent me those hose pliers amazing the difference this is what came out of the carburetor a bit of debris and some bad fuel but no water surprisingly anyway I'm gonna open up the fuel valve on the external fuel supply I want to make sure that fuel is making it to the carburetor and that's going to flush out whatever junk is left in there so yeah looks like we do have fuel flow so that is good I'd say this has a decent chance of starting so let me get set up a little bit better with a light and we'll put that drain back in and we'll try starting it so what do you think is the engine going to run and is it going to make power I think Definitely Maybe on at least one of those so let's start it or at least try and see what happens is up on or is up off I'm not sure [Applause] okay not too bad and to answer that question Up is on and it started the engine actually ran well and the light was trying to come on and surprisingly we're getting about 10 to 13 volts out and when I shut the switch off as the engine was powering down the light actually came on pretty bright so I'm leaning towards an AVR problem rather than anything else at this time so I'm going to grab another AVR plug it in and try this again yeah we got a few to choose from here well maybe not that one it says bad so we have a few here I think I'll just pick one plug it in it really shouldn't matter as long as the capacitor is rated the same usually it's 470 microfarad and that's usually what I see on these generators from the 5000 to 8 000 watt range so I would suspect any one of these should work so let's give one a try I'm gonna give this one a try I can't actually read the microfarad rating on this capacitor and it's a little weird too the paper should be wrapped around the top you can kind of see that here but that's not the case so yeah maybe this one just has a bad capacitor potentially these wires they are polarity sensitive so make sure the positive wire goes on the left terminal all right let's try that [Applause] and that would be a no the AVR does not seem to be the issue it actually did worse because I didn't see that light come on at all but I didn't want to leave it on very long either if there is something wrong with that power hit so I'm going to double check my work down on the power head because clearly I think I missed something I just double checked the state or health using the multimeter didn't find any faults to ground again no shorts to adjacent coils so I'm kind of scratching my head on this one I have a feeling I'm missing something important I did swap out the AVR again and this time I left some of the auxiliary windings disconnected so right now only the stator is connected in the AVR and that's the minimum you need to get power so I'm gonna try starting this again to be honest I'm not expecting a different result I think there is something wrong with that power head foreign [Applause] pretty much the same thing the light was just faintly flickering the generator could not power up so I'm fairly certain it is a ground fault that I couldn't really detect although I did detect A Fault In the rotor it was around well less than three million ohms which is low but I still would have expected it to power up even with 3 million ohms connection to ground but I'm thinking that yeah that might be the issue here so unfortunately I think this does need a new power head it's not sitting well with me that a three million Ohm connection to ground on the rotor would cause this to not power up so I went to double check it one lead on ground the other on one of the brush terminals and now we're getting 32 ohms to ground so yeah the rotor it is bad and because of that this cannot power up I'm at a bit of a Crossroads as far as what to do about this generator it needs a new power head I only have one that'll fit and it's a brand new 5500 watt one so it's a perfect replacement but it is brand new it's a 200 power head and I kind of hate to put it on here because this in this condition I'd be lucky to get 200 even if it worked so putting that power head on here may not be the best idea the alternative would be to take this engine and the new Power head and drop it in on this Frame which is in good condition I have a gas tank for it which is also in good condition but this isn't a slam dunk either because this says it's 7250 Watts which that generator is not it's 5500 watts so at a minimum I'd have to switch out these 30 amp circuit breakers for 25 amp circuit breakers to make it safe and then do something with that label or just leave it the way it is and disclose it when I'm selling it but those aren't the only issues because the power head is physically smaller by about an inch then that means these mounts for the engine and the stator they're not going to line up they're going to be an inch too far apart and that's also going to cause issues with the exhaust and where it mounts so I'm going to have to give this a little bit of thought as far as which approach to take before I get the power head off I think I'm going to drain the tank get that tank out of the way and then the exhaust has to be removed because it's actually secured by the power head and once that's uninstalled we should be able to get that power head off we started off pretty well but it is barely coming out at this point and the Tank's not completely empty they're still some fuel in there so it is clogged up so yeah I think I'll just shut this off get the tank uninstalled we'll just get the fuel petcock off and dump the rest into this bottle [Music] foreign [Music] foreign I think that's it still a lot of junk in there so I'm rinsing the tank out a bit with some fresh gas I try to reuse as much old fuel as possible but some stuff just can't be saved so this is definitely going to be recycled and the Hazardous Waste the tank after only a few minutes of running some clean fuel through it you can see the tank is cleaning up pretty well so this tank is definitely reusable foreign foreign all right [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] foreign I think we're ready to go here I've got all the wires disconnected again really the only thing left is to free the stator mounts from the frame and support the engine with some wood and then we can take the bolts out and use the puller to slide that stator off foreign foreign don't even need a wrench for this one foreign I've been looking this over really carefully trying to find where the ground fault is it's an unusual way for a rotor to fail usually they fail when the solder joint breaks or the wire connecting over to their brakes due to the vibrations but you know in this case the wires actually sleeved and I don't see anywhere where it's making contact and you can see it's it's insulated pretty well I mean it's it's basically in a plastic shell each coil we have some turns here and here but again it's on plastic and really the only opportunity I see for it to ground out would be where it connects over to the slip rings but those connections look clean so I was hoping maybe to fix this one I don't see where the ground fault is all right change a plan I just checked my stash of rotors and this one seems to be the winner because it matches in every Dimension that's important they both came from Honda clones so they accept the same type of tapered shaft the diameter of the ball bearings are matched as well as the fan and the body of the rotor the actual length has to match as well and it's a perfect match so yeah I think we're gonna do the easy thing here and put this one on use the old frame and this repair is not going to cost anything but let's just double check the resistance make sure it's between 40 and 70 ohms and we're at 53 that's perfect and no connection to ground so this is a very healthy rotor it should be a direct replacement for that one and maybe an upgrade as well has a metal fan and I noticed while spinning this ball bearing it's a little crunchy but this one perfect so let's get this rotor installed we'll put that stator back on and give it another go although first I think I'm going to blow this out there's a bunch of leaves I think in there and we'll clean up this bottom rail because we're not going to have access to it later like we do now foreign [Music] yeah maybe I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch even though this rotor seemed to be good the fan it's bottomed out against the bell housing and now it won't rotate so unfortunately I think this rotor is out so let me get this off I'm just going to double check everything else that I have to see if there's anything better unfortunately I don't have a rotor that fits any better than the one that I thought did you know even though every Dimension seemed to match there is one important difference here and that is where the taper starts this is the bad rotor and you can see the taper starts almost at the same level as the fan and if you look at this other one it's recessed quite a bit at least a third of an inch so the tapered shaft it wasn't even engaging before this fan bottomed out against the bell housing so I think we're back to the original plan I'm gonna get that engine onto the Predator frame we'll install the Ryobi power head which I already double checked the taper looks a lot more like this so I think we'll be okay and build ourselves a predator I'm gonna take a second and just drain the oil before pulling the engine off the frame because when installing the new Power head most likely I'm going to use gravity to my advantage and stand the engine up to let that power head drop in place but if the oil is in there there's a chance it could spill out of the Breather foreign wow that was on there pretty tight oil looks to be really good no metallic in there no bits of metal and the oil doesn't look that old so I think it was changed relatively recently so that is a good sign foreign not able to lift the engine off because it's interfering with the control panel here so I do need to get that off there should only be two bolts on each side holding it in you know at this point all the wires have been disconnected so it should be as easy as removing these and this should just come right off foreign size foreign [Applause] yeah that wasn't too bad so we are completely disassembled at least as far as we need to be at this point so before I start putting things back together I do want to get that rotor up on the bench I want to try unwinding it to see if I can't find where the fault is and second thought I'm not going to unwind this the wires they are coated in an enamel and they're kind of glued together so you really can't just unwind it without causing more damage but I do want to get the plate off on both sides because a failure under this plate to ground would definitely cause the issue we're seeing so there's a plate on each side let's get that off get this insulating paper off and see if there's any clues under there foreign [Music] nothing obvious there but let's just take it to ground now that the plate is removed and there's a high connection to ground still a connection but it's very high now it's infinite interesting so yeah the connection to ground it is still there it changes a lot as far as how bad that short is to ground [Music] interesting there's absolutely no connection to ground anymore so the failure is somewhere right here I'm not sure what to think about this one the connection to ground it is definitely gone and I've been probing around while keeping one of the leads on a slip ring to these wires that are pretty shallow here and I haven't gotten a hit so yeah I don't think the failure is on the surface here and I even put the plate back on torqued it back down still no ground fault so I'm not sure exactly what's going on here but even if there was a failure in the insulation right here the back of the plate it's insulated pretty well so I don't think it would pick up the ground from there my best guess is that when this plate is torqued down in place it's actually pushing the wires down and you can see this plastic insulation it doesn't go all the way through it stops in the middle so it might be enough to push this bundle of wire up against the metal on either one of these sides and that is what is creating that intermittent ground fault so I think I'm going to stick to the original plan and not use this rotor I don't think it's going to be very reliable well guys I think that's about it for now it's pretty late at night and I'm going on vacation bright and early in the morning but we've made a lot of progress we've heard the engine run it sounds good and somehow that carburetor is actually running the engine well despite what we saw in the tank we got to the bottom of why this generator was not making power and yeah this Frame it's really not as bad as I thought it was I think the biggest issue is just the sun fading the rust you know the tank isn't great and the control panel has been hacked up so my hope is to use the Predator frame it's in great shape it has a good tank and I even have a wheel kit for it but there is going to be some complications to that and potentially it's not going to work out so either way it will end up on one of these frames so until next time I hope this video helps someone thanks for watching foreign

Channel: James Condon

Views: 77,706

Keywords: AVR, Alternator, Automatic Voltage Regulator, Bad Powerhead, Chicago Electric, Diagnostics, Engine Runs But No Power, Fixed, Flickering Light, Generator, Ground Fault, Hertz, How To, How to remove generator rotor, How-To, Insulation Test, Load Test, Low Voltage, No Output, No Power, Ohms, Puller, Repair, Rotor Test, Small Engine, Stator Test, Troubleshooting, Volts

Id: c-wfqG3dDuQ

Length: 53min 35sec (3215 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023