Generator Not Making Power - Testing and Repair

hey guys welcome back so today i brought home this stormresponder generator it was only 150 and there's a good reason for that this generator stopped making power but that's okay because i picked up recently another storm responder with a blown engine so worst case this will be an engine swap video but before doing that i want to make sure this power head is dead so i'm going to get you set up a little bit better we'll break out the multimeter and do a little bit of testing okay got the multimeter set up in ohms and for this test you want to test the stator through the outlets but before you do that check with the resistances of your meter this one i know is 0.1 ohms some meters can be quite a bit higher and that's important because the readings here are pretty low and whatever reading i get you want to subtract that number from it to find out the true reading now this is a 240 volt generator which means it has two 120 volt legs and sometimes it's wired leg one leg two on the storm responder i know they do it this way leg one leg two so you can test each of the legs through the outlets but the 240 volt one is the one i use it's actually easier you know you're testing the separate legs without guessing so just look for the one with the tab that's the ground opposites neutral then we got leg one leg two and you just want to put one of the probes in it doesn't matter which one into the neutral and the other into one of the legs and this generator should be around 0.2 or 0.3 ohms on the stator and we get nothing but the circuit breaker is off so this is point 0.4.3 subtract one from that we're at like point two point three that's a good reading and point three point two so this one's a little bit healthier but they're both within spec so from the outside it looks like the stator is good i wonder if that's the issue well let's get the cap off see what it looks like and we can run some more tests in there i mean visually the stator looks to be in excellent condition so i guess the next thing i want to do is pull the brushes that'll let me test the slip rings and the dpe winding i do see a couple issues here the wires usually exit in the same direction but this one is turned the wrong way so someone's definitely been in here and also this tab right here should be facing in but it was facing out and that that's going to cause a problem because this here is a bridge rectifier it's changing this ac voltage into dc and applying it to the rotor but by doing it backwards positive and negative are now reversed on the rotor and that's not going to damage the rotor but the residual magnetism and actually this one has permanent magnets on it but the way they're set up is they're expecting the rotor to power up in a certain way if north pole and south pole are reversed which it is then it's not going to power up so this this could be it but i am going to pull these wires anyway we'll just check the dpe for resistance and we'll check the slip rings okay so hopefully you can see the meter i'm just going to put one lead on each of these wires i don't know what the reading should be on this usually they're around 1.5 ohms so anywhere in that range would make me pretty happy and we're at 1.5 1.4 yeah that's perfect and now i'm going to check the slip rings it's around 24 ohms i believe for this generator at least that's what i normally see 25.4 so i would actually say this powerhead is fine the brushes are on backwards that's an easy fix so tab side in you want to hook up the red wire to the top the blue to the bottom it actually shouldn't matter because it is ac in the important thing is the tab goes in so and this bolt is uh kind of stripped out they do strip out easily obviously i didn't do it i haven't even put a wrench on it yet i'm going to put some teflon on it just to hold it these do not these bolts do not need to be tight but you do want them secure enough to keep this still which it is but i think the biggest danger is if this gets looser it could potentially fall out and cause a problem so the teflon will will help prevent that and allow the what's left of the threads to bite in a bit better yeah it's much better and that's it i don't even use a wrench to tighten those brushes again these strip out really easily you want to go very easy on them okay i'm not sure what came first the chicken or the egg but that circuit breaker was off and potentially it was switched off or it tripped and the previous owner in his troubleshooting removed the brushes and then put him back the wrong way i'm not sure but that did not happen on its own and based on what i'm seeing the way the stator looks and the way it tests i think this will make power so i'm going to bring this outside start it up and see what we get nothing i'm gonna grab a drill and try to flash it so this one does surprise me a bit i would have expected something out of this generator potentially there's something wrong on that bridge rectifier which contains the brushes so i do have an extra one it actually has a chipped brush but i'm going to throw that one on temporarily and see if it makes any difference so this is the extra set of brushes i have and it's not terrible but it is chipped kind of right on this corner but it still is going to make plenty of contact and that will let me validate i guess what the issue is potentially it could be a bad diode or potentially just a broken wire between the brush and this bridge rectifier okay let's try this again nothing 0.8 volts so only 0.8 volts out of the stator which is surprising based on the test i did before i thought we would have got power and the dpe winding it tested well it was 1.4 ohms so i was expecting that the rotor would power up and either the stator would work or let out a bunch of smoke and we got neither so that tells me this the rotor did not power up and even with the new brush set and the bridge rectifier it didn't change things i even tried flashing it got nothing so in my mind there's only one possibility the rotor itself might have a broken solder joint where it attaches to the slip rings so i'm gonna have to dig a little bit deeper on this most likely get the stator off and get a closer look at that rotor so before pulling this off i'm going to do a few more tests and you can see i've been disconnecting stuff so i disconnected the dpe winding again i also removed the ground and this plug goes to the back of this box i unplug that that just gives me direct access to each of the main windings once it goes up here it actually combines two of the windings to make 240 but i want to test them individually so the way this is set up that's the ground we got leg one leg two and that's leg one leg two they kind of like crisscrossed so what i want to do here is test each coil again but test it to see if there's a connection to ground so i'm in ohms again and i have one lead on the dpe winding and we'll check around and we get nothing so now we'll check each of the main windings nothing and nothing so dpe winding seems good do the same test for leg one check it to ground and nothing then we'll check it to the other hot coil nothing and then to the dpe nothing and then leg two same test check it to ground nothing check it to the dpe nothing nothing so that's good i mean the coils the insulation seems to be good at least at low voltage nothing's cross connected nothing's going to ground this should power up so i'm going to think about this for a minute before taking the stator off but i think it's going to have to come off okay gonna try applying 12 volts i was hesitant to do that that's usually my go-to but the way i usually do it is attaching it right to the brushes in this case you can't go direct to the brushes you have to go through the bridge rectifier which changes ac to dc but after thinking about it a bit if i put dc in it's just gonna put dc out it should not cause a problem so i have everything ready to go the wires the alligator clips are on the brushes and i get the positive hooked up through a fuse and this multimeter is hooked up to an outlet set to volts ac this one volts ac connected to dpe winding so i'm going to power it or start the generator apply 12 volts and see what we get okay good we got about 70 volts out on the stator and i think about 80 on the dpe and the light came on so everything is working the way that i thought let me reconnect the dpe to the brushes restart it potentially that brought the magnetism back well it definitely brought it back hopefully it brings the power back okay i did shut it off pretty quickly it sounded like the generator was going under load which is a bad sign that usually means as a short in the stator and that will be followed shortly by smoke coming out of the stator and maybe fire based on all the testing with the multimeter this power head should be good but the testing outside tells me otherwise this if it was a loss of magnetism or an issue with the circuit board or brushes what i did should have brought it back and it's not making power on its own and at one point it went under load and that's a sign of a short within the stator so i'm ready to call it on this power head i have another one sitting here on the floor right there that is from a storm responder as well that one actually has an avr so it's a bit of an upgrade to what's on there now i'm gonna take a second just get the fuel tank off the heat shield and start working on getting the power head removed so i'm just going to use a gear puller to get the ball bearing out and this just goes on the center bolt for the rotor and this kind of holds on the bell housing kind of on either side of the bearing and you want to be gentle i have cracked these before they're aluminum don't apply too much force this rotor doesn't have threads on it so i need to lock the engine up put some threads on it and then i can torque down on a on a rod to pop this off okay i'm using an m12 1.75 to tap the threads okay ready to give this a try i've got a bunch of rods cut to size from previous generators and this one seems to be a pretty close match so i think it'll work but the idea is you want to find one that's larger in diameter but that still fits down if it was the same size then you would basically push it into the threads on the crank and mess them up and in this case you want it to be a little bit shorter so i use this one to measure with i put it in and slide it down until it reaches the shaft and i'm just putting my thumb where it exits and you want the rod to be a little bit shorter this one might be a touch too short but i think it'll work so i'm going to give it a try so wow this one's not letting go so i might have to give it a little tap and hopefully it doesn't pop off when i walk away okay well sorry about that you missed it but that last hit which hit the camera also popped the rotor off and now we're pretty much at the last step there's four bolts holding this bell housing on this has to come off it is a different bell housing on the other power head the bolts that just came out were lock tightened in but no lock nuts and these are the ones that held the new bell housing in and these were not loctited but had these lock washers and i'm going to lock tight it anyway you know i you don't want these loosening up because if it comes out at all it'll hit the fan and completely destroy your power head tightening these two 20 foot pounds and i don't have a speck on them if whatever reason this bell housing doesn't have a backing so this plate serves that purpose really just to keep leaves and debris and critters out of the generator head the diameter of the shaft where this bolt goes is about well it's .39 inches but the bolt is .31 so when i tighten the bolt down it's pretty much impossible to center it it always goes off to one side so i am kind of building up a shoulder with some electrical tape to get the same diameter that way when i torque down things will stay pretty centered foreign it seems like i always run into trouble with this box i need to pull it out so i can lift the stator up a little bit higher to get it slid in okay that's 80 inch pounds typically these are between 80 and 120 so i'm going to bring it up a bit more but i don't think i'm gonna go over a hundred 100 it is going to pull the engine over a few times i want to make sure that the engine is not binding and that there's no scraping and we're good so i don't know if you spotted it but the whole thing is kind of going downhill not the frame but the stator to the engine and that's because the legs on the stator are not quite right and i could eliminate those insulators right there and that would level things out but i do have some engine mounts that will elevate the engine side by about an inch so i'm going to give those a try and hopefully that is enough [Music] you much better that's the way it should be there's not much left just going to add the brushes the avr attach that ground wire throw that end cap on and the receptacle box then we can bring it outside red goes on the left this is the back side of the bad stator and at first glance things look great the copper is a good color no burns ropes are not broken and even when you look down these slots the paper here nothing is melted or burnt but there is one area of concern right there and if i zoom in you can see those wires did get burned and yeah that's all it was sometimes it's very obvious they test bad they look bad in this case very small failure led to a bad stator okay it's a bit windy outside i'm not going to talk much just want to get this started make sure it makes power we'll load it up and see how it does the power 114 volts 61.3 hertz not too bad not too bad it makes power a touch low so i will adjust that we're at 114 volts engine speed was decent unloaded i think it was at 61 and loaded up it was 58.5 i think uh which is fine so i'm glad that generator head works i mean it tested well but it came off a storm responder with a blown engine so this the first time i've actually seen it make power anyway i'm going to get this back inside we'll get the heat shield the tank on we'll bring it out again adjust that voltage and just finish things up hey so okay i still have the end cover off on the generator head i'm gonna pop the avr off adjust the potentiometer to get that voltage to come up and that's the adjustment right there usually clockwise will bring it up so i'm going to turn it half a turn clockwise and you know sometimes half turn will move it a volt maybe half a volt and other times it'll bring it up about 12 volts so i need to figure out how sensitive this is so start with half a turn and see what the voltage is at okay half a turn did two volts so we need another full turn and i'll probably go a touch past it i'd rather have it around 121 122 than the other way around so okay that was perfect i think we're at about 120.3 volts so that's where it should be i'm just gonna neaten everything up there in the generator head get the cap on and call it done [Music] this screw here holds the zip tie that keeps this kind of tucked away so [Music] okay now for the hard part i did test the end cap it fits but only just takes a bit of uh doing but it should go on that original stator had me fooled it tested well and it looked good but there was no voltage coming out so i replaced the brushes the bridge rectifier nothing i tried flashing it with a drill got nothing it wasn't until i applied 12 volts to the brushes that i got power out of the stator but that was it you know i thought we were home free at that point but after reconnecting everything normally still no power out and for about a second the engine did go under load and that's all i needed to hear if the engine is going under load but there's no load applied the stator is bad so luckily i had another one from a storm responder this one's a little better because it has an avr and it was pretty much a direct replacement the only modification really was just adding the shims to the engine to level things out and now it's making power we're at 120 volts and this thing's pretty much done it's doing what it should so i hope this video helps someone thanks for watching not quite done yet it's actually been about seven weeks since i shot this video and i've learned two things since then first the dark marks on the stator was actually some sort of epoxy i found traces of it in other locations on the stator that had nothing to do with the wiring so the stator definitely did not melt down and more recently i actually went to use those brushes the ones that came with this generator on a different machine and they didn't work so i tested them and one of the diodes was bad it was a dead short basically it would have been sending ac power from the dpe winding into the rotor completely messing up the residual magnetism so you know i did swap the brushes but what i didn't show was when that didn't work i quickly switched back to the original set of brushes so most of my testing was with a bad set of brushes so long story short i don't think the powerhead is bad and actually i'm going to have another go at it in a separate video in a couple weeks from now so now i'm done thanks for watching

Channel: James Condon

Views: 336,875

Keywords: 030430, 030430-01, 12v Battery, 2126312, 216312-0110, 216312-0110-B1, AVR, Bad AVR, Bad Brushes, Bad Generator Head, Bridge Rectifier, Briggs and Stratton, Brushes, Drill, Fixed, Flashing, Generator Goes Under Load, Generator, Install Generator Head, No Output, No Power, Ohms, Repower, Small Engine, Storm Responder, Testing, Troubleshooting

Id: l4QC68rGXhs

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021