How To Test and Fix A Brushless Generator

hey guys welcome back so today I brought home this 9 000 watt gen Pro generator it's about 25 years old and can produce 9 000 continuous Watts its condition appears to be excellent and powering it is a 16 horse Briggs V-twin engine so yeah this is a very nice machine now this actually doesn't belong to me a local subscriber tracked me down when it stopped making power he said he was running it it had no load on it but it went under load and that is never a good thing that's usually a sign that there is an issue in the stator but that's what we're going to find out so let me get this off the trailer I want to get it running before bringing it inside just make sure the engine is good and in fact it is not making any power foreign [Music] yep there is gas and it smells good and to check the oil to get the dipstick out this piece actually has to be removed so let's get that out of the way make sure we have some oil yeah there's plenty of oil and it looks clean all right let's give it a try there is no fuel valve so if we crank it the pump should pick up the fuel and I've got two lights connected one on each leg and we'll just turn the main circuit breaker on we also have a meter here so we can see if there's any output and there's an hour clock we're only at 319 hours so yeah pretty young I mean an engine like this can easily last two thousand [Applause] confirmed there's no output from this generator and the engine it sounds good but the carburetor was having issues I did have to choke the engine to kind of get it to smooth out a bit you know that's something I'm not going to worry about right now I think the big issue here is that lack of power now I've had good luck with brushless generators I've actually never had one with a bad stator or rotor My Hope Is we have a bad capacitor so let's get this inside we'll get things opened up find that capacitor and we'll test it foreign by getting this cover off just do a visual inspection make sure I don't see anything burnt a lot of times too the capacitor is down here sometimes it's in the control panel and judging by the size of this control panel there's a good chance it's in there but we'll start down here now there are only two screws holding this cover on there on the side and you can't use a ratchet or a socket on it you have to use a screwdriver so that's the shortest one I have it looks like it's perfect oh and the screws already loose even better and so is that one okay looks very nice in here that doesn't actually seem to be a way to completely remove the cover without disconnecting the wires and the wires they are not meant to be disconnected from down here but visually the windings look to be great I don't see any broken lacing no burn marks so yeah things actually look pretty good down here so I say we open up the control panel and test the stator from there so to get this off it looks like you want to take the face off it's just two screws on each side and that face panel should move forward and if you want to get the whole box off there's actually two bolts down under there and two more tucked away in there it's very hard to see so the tank and the heat shield would have to come off first I say we just pull the face plate off and that'll at least let us get a look inside everything looks really clean up here the two main legs come in to the circuit breaker right there and then Branch off a couple leads go over here which that is the volt meter and then we have one lead coming over here to the Y terminal in the other lead it looks like to the X terminal and then things are jumpered over from there into these smaller fuses which feed these other receptacles so I would suspect that this is our issue right here looks like it's a 50 microfarad capacitor so let's get this cap off see if we can disconnect those wires and see what it tests at it's nice that there's a cap on here so there's no accidents and interesting they actually soldered the capacitor on so I'm not sure why they would do that so it is a component that does tend to fail over time let's make sure it's discharged and it is so to test this it really needs to be disconnected and we seem to have plenty of wire here so I think I'm just going to snip these leads off we can put some new ones on if we need to and uh yeah let's let's get this tested and I can see already actually there is a problem that does not look normal that spot right there so the capacitor without even testing it I would say is the problem all right let's see what this capacitor is at it should be 50 microfarad plus or minus usually about five percent in this case it says six percent so somewhere around 50 and we get an open and that's what this meter does when it reaches its limit I'm pretty sure this can only test up to 200 microfarads so whatever this is it's not 50 it's actually above 200. and just for comparison I have this one it's rated at 30 microfarad and we're at 29.5 and here we actually have two capacitors these are old and used 20 microfarad each in parallel so it should come in at about 40. and it comes in at 40. so yeah this capacitor it's bad and you can see that right there and the multimeter confirmed that so that is an easy fix we only need another one of these with a 50 microfarad rating of at least 370 volts or higher the farad rating has to match exactly and that should fix this so I just placed an order on eBay for a new capacitor it's exactly the same as the one that was pulled off there and it was only about thirty dollars so that'll be here in a few days and while waiting for that I think it makes sense to pull this carb apart because it wouldn't run without the engine choked quite a bit this pre-filter probably needs to be replaced it actually it's not falling apart yet but it's getting to that point where I think it's going to start biodegrading really soon filter though looks to be in very good shape so to get the air box off I think it's just these four bolts plus this one right here and then the Breather unplugs from underneath where it connects to the engine just going to close the choke so that way I hopefully won't lose one of these bolts down the intake I want to be careful with this carb they're quite expensive I actually had to buy one of these once and that was about four or five years ago it was about 250 dollars and I can only imagine they're more expensive now back then they didn't have a clone as an option they do now not sure if they're any good but I do not want to find out so this carburetor technically you don't have to take it off if it's just a clogged pilot jet and that's the way it's behaving so if I remove these four bolts I should be able to lift the top off I'll have access to the pilot jet the emulsion tube and the bowl so if it's not too bad I might be able to clean it that way otherwise it's more involved because I can't just pull the bolts to get the carb off I actually have to pull the blower housing and the entire intake manifold which is fine but if it's not needed I would rather leave good enough alone so let's at least take a look inside and see if we can clean it up that way it actually looks pretty clean in here considering I mean there's no fuel shut off so most likely this carb has had fuel in it most of its life you know maybe there's a bit of debris down there but all things considered I'd say it's pretty good anyway this is what I'm suspicious of right here this is the pilot jet so I'm going to get that out we'll just go through it also the emotion tube is on the underside of the top I took off so we'll make sure that is clean in the main jet you can kind of just see it right there it's on the side the way you would access it is removing the bolt on the side of the carburetor and cleaning it that way and that I don't think is possible unless you actually remove the carburetor so for now I'm just going to clean this jet and the emulsion tube we'll put it back together we'll try it again and if it runs well we'll call it good otherwise we're going back in and we have to tear the whole front of the engine off meaning the blower housing and the intake manifold to get Total Access to this carb doesn't fit that is an odd size so the closest one that fits is actually not a great fit and there's a reasonable chance that could strip it out oh we'll try it yep it's coming no that was not clogged that may have been a little yeah I would say that was clogged right on the bottom and that that may have been enough to cause that surge so yeah let's get this installed I'll double check the emulsion tube but I think that looks pretty good and we'll try this again and yeah there's actually no debris down there it's a little discolored maybe stained but nothing that's loose foreign foreign let's try it real quick we'll see if we can turn the choke off [Music] thank you and that was it just a tiny little bit of debris in that pilot jet and that's why the engine surged before you know this time I was able to turn the choke off right away in the engine ran well so taking that shortcut I think paid off that carb was in pretty good shape and didn't need much attention as far as the rest of the machine goes it's equally in good shape I mean the battery is good the oil was full and clean so there's not a lot to do here other than wait for the capacitor you know that said I am going to clean it up a bit just get some of the dust off and when the capacitor arrives we'll get that installed and hopefully this thing will come to life foreign the new capacitor showed up today so let's just have a look at it and make sure it's correct and it seems to be 50 microfarad 370 volts same form factor and it even comes with this cap and the wire leads soldered on just like the original so let's see what this comes in at it's plus or minus six percent so anywhere between 47 and 53 microfarad is within spec and in this case we're at 47.1 so a little bit on the low side but it is within spec so it should be good to go so I think the plan here is just to cut the wires short I'm not gonna disconnect them down on the power head there's no reason to do that and then I'll take the new capacitor and take some length off of this maybe nine inches or so I'm just going to leave some extra wire length here it's not going to hurt anything and originally I was thinking of just removing these terminals putting some connectors on that just slide on but then we're going to deal with a crimp connection and really a friction fit connection whereas if I just use a crimp on style connection I'm eliminating one area of weakness you want to make sure all these wires get in there you don't want any poking out the side all right let's give this a quick try I've got the light plugged in and turned on on one of the outlets and the kilowatt on the other now I'm not sure if those are tripped or not so I guess the plan is to start it hopefully things come on if not we'll try resetting the GFCI outlets now this doesn't have an AVR so I would say best case scenario if everything's tuned right we're going to be hopefully at 130 volts without a load so let's give it a try [Music] [Applause] well what can I say I think we have bigger issues here the light it was slow to come on it came on at about full brightness and then it slowly dimmed out so I shut it down to avoid any damage clearly there's a bigger issue going on here than just a bad capacitor so hopefully wouldn't blow the new one out I'm going to open up the control panel we'll double check it make sure it's okay and I think we need to dig in check the health of the stator double check the wiring and see what is wrong with this generator so I would find it pretty hard to believe that we have a bad capacitor and a totally separate problem not impossible and this capacitor blew out looks like the same spot very interesting let's make sure it's discharged and it is [Applause] so let's start by checking the excitation winding now I don't know the specs on this generator and this one is larger than most I work on usually an excitation winding comes in at about 1.5 ohms plus or minus about half an OHM in this case we're at 1.3 so that actually seems decent I think what I need to do next here is to isolate the main windings coming up so they're coming up and going right to the circuit breaker and once I get them isolated you know we can do some more tests on leg one and leg two we can check it to ground to make sure there's no connection and then just check between the different legs and make sure nothing is cross-connected I'm just going to mark this leg with some blue tape so it goes back in the same spot and the voltmeter it is wired to the 240 so the highest I saw the 240 get up to is about 120 volts before the power dropped off lakewater Lake 2 have been disconnected and the neutral which should be the common point between the two so if I test this between leg 1 and leg two on most generators this would be about one ohm and we're at 0.4.5 that's pretty low it's 0.4 and this meter has a resistance of 0.1 in the lead so we're actually at 0.3 ohms between leg 1 and leg two which is pretty low so that to me is a bit of a red flag and then if I do between leg one and leg two we should get roughly half that and we're not 0.3.4 0.3.4 so that is interesting this should be double should be around 0.6 and now it is a little higher so that is a little suspicious let's just check this to ground and we do have a connection to ground so that might be the problem right there just to be sure I'm going to disconnect to the ground wire I assume this goes to the body ground but could be wrong we'll just disconnect it to make sure and sometimes it can also be a jumper so let's check between ground and neutral now if it's jumpered somewhere we might get a connection if we have a fault in the stator we'll get a connection and yeah we're getting a connection you know we are isolated up here we should not be getting a connection so I think we need to pull the uncover off the stator just make sure there's nothing going on down there so here are the two black wires coming from the control panel leg 1 and leg two the neutral in the ground the White and the green wire they're actually both grounds they connect right here to the frame so that is interesting usually the neutral which is the white wire is the center tap between leg one and leg two and there are two other wires right here that come from the stator that are connected to the frame so I'm thinking these are actually the neutrals for leg one and leg two and then the neutral gets picked up and brought over to the Outlets from the frame and then of course we have the bond for the ground so that is a unique setup usually I would see this on a terminal block that's isolated the neutral coming out of the stator leg one and leg two with the neutral wire connected to that and then if it's floating then that would remain isolated and if it's bonded there'd be a jumper from the isolated neutral of the stator to the body and yeah this one's kind of weird so you know I would say there's a possibility we just have some corrosion here and we're getting a bad neutral connection based on what I'm seeing of course the fact that the capacitor blew tells me otherwise you know I think we must have an insulation failure so let's isolate leg one and leg two by removing this nut right here would do the same test as we did before except this time we'll actually be on the proper wires so let's see here I've got a jumper on one of the neutrals I'm not sure if it's leg one or leg two we'll just connect this over here and this wire is going to introduce some resistance for sure I think it'll be okay though we're just trying to figure out where the fault is so let's just check it to this leg and we get a connection 0.3 ohms a little low but not terrible and we should get no connection there because we're only connected to one of the neutrals coming out of the stator let's just check it to engine ground now that we're isolated no fault and let's just check it to the excitation so that leg appears to be okay let me move the alligator clip over to the other it's been moved over so we should get no connection there and we don't and here we should get around 0.2.3 which we're close it is a little higher so this one is suspicious let's check it to engine ground no connection and check it to the excitation winding no connection so at least so far this low voltage test is looking pretty good I'm not seeing any connections where there shouldn't be so that is interesting might have to break out the high voltage tester all right let's give this a quick test I've got the high voltage tester out one lead is connected to ground this green wire which runs over here and is attached to the stator the other lead on the high voltage tester is connected to the stator body and like this it should be a dead short so I just want to double check that everything is what I think it is meaning if I set this to 500 volts and turn this handle the needle should go right to zero which is all the way to the right and you can see that's where it is so that is a dead short so let's move that lead off of the stator body and we'll connect it to leg one now I've actually connected leg one and leg two down on the stator so this is testing both of them to ground and ideally we want to see a connection 10 million ohms or less all the way over here we're looking at you know 500 million ohms to infinite and a 500 volts we are basically infinite so the insulation seems to be good let's check it at a thousand thousand volts and we have good insulation quality so no issue between leg 1 and leg two to ground so let's move that over to the DPE winding we'll test that to ground at 500 volts and we have good insulation over 500 million ohms so that is good now at a thousand volts same thing so it seems like things are looking pretty good I don't see any faults between leg 1 and leg two to ground or the excitation winding so let's now check from the excitation winding to leg 1 and leg two so we'll get this off of ground move it over here and I have leg one and leg two common up back in the power head again so we are testing both leg one and leg two to the excitation and we have very good insulation between them we'll try it at a thousand volts and same thing so that's a good sign I'm not seeing a short or bad insulation between any of the windings and ground and between the excitation winding and leg one and leg two I guess the last test I can do is check between leg one and leg two so I'm going to double check that by removing this jumper we'll separate those so leg one and leg two they are now isolated and we'll move some stuff around here so right now we do have one lead on leg one put the other one on leg two and we'll check it at 500 volts installation seems good and now at a thousand it's not quite as good it's a little erratic especially when I just start turning this it goes down to about 10 million ohms which is a little suspicious and it's fluctuating quite a bit try it a little faster here yeah so that that's a little suspicious the way this is acting so potentially there's an issue between leg one and leg two I don't think that would explain necessarily why it would blow out the capacitor I did double check it and yeah it's open so that new capacitor is toast so I would say this is inconclusive at best you know I do have another high voltage tester it can go higher than a thousand volts so I say we break that one out so let's do the same tests I'm going to set this to 2500 volts which is way more than I should need to worry about on a 240 volt generator I've got one lead connected here to the excitation winding and I'm going to hold the other one just on the stator housing and we'll test it so we're already at eight giga ohms and climbing so no issues there let's see I have leg 1 and leg two isolated from each other so we'll check each one individually right around four gigahons no issues there check the other leg and we're at about 10 Giga ohm and climbing so no faults to ground from anything so let's check from this leg to the excitation winding and that's where it gets a little sketchy because there's no clip here so we'll try not to touch this at 2500 volts and we're at 18 Giga ohm no issues there let's check between leg 1 and leg two Maybe and we're at about two Giga ohms no issues there and let's see what else I guess we can test from the other leg to the excitation winding and we get a short or I didn't hit the button 12 gig at home and climbing so yeah I don't think we're dealing with an insulation failure you know maybe I got a bad capacitor and it failed in exactly the same way as the other one which I would find hard to believe so let me give this one some thought and yeah I'll get back to you it's the next day and I did some research I was able to locate a service manual for this generator and for the most part the testing we did that we just did agrees with what that manual says that manual also has a chart of the good resistance values for all the windings and for the most part it seems to agree with the results we got granted this meter is not very accurate for super low ohms tests and this manual actually lists the resistance to three decimal spots which this cheap meter cannot do so I do want to get a more precise reading before I do that though I can do a quick and dirty test on the rotor the problem with brushless rotors is that there are diodes in circuit and there's no slip rings to get a really good test you have to actually remove the stator desolder the diodes get them out of circuit and then do some tests but for now if we just test on each diode on the solder connection facing the rotor we should get about 0.5 ohms yeah it looks like we're about there at 0.6.7 you subtract the 0.1 that's built into these leads and we're right around 0.5 ohms so yeah no Smoking Gun there either now we are really running out of options here because the only two things you can service on a brushless generator are the capacitor and the diodes and the diodes are really a last resort according to the service manual these diodes were over built for this machine and they should not fail according to the manufacturer but anything is possible for this last test I'm just going to use this constant current capable power supply right now I've got it set to Output exactly one amp and we'll just double check that with the meter and I hooked it up backwards but you can see we're at 1.002 amps DC so what we can do with that is connect it to a winding and that's going to put one amp of power in then we can just measure the voltage and from there we can get the exact resistance if the excitation winding we're at 1.196 volts and because I'm using an amp it makes the conversion real easy we're at 1.195 ohms and that actually is a little bit off according to the service manual according to the service manual the minimum value is 1.218 and we're at 1.196 so if I were to believe what I'm reading in that manual that means the excitation winding is junk so let's let's double check another winding here we'll check leg one we're at 0.166 volts and that translates roughly into 0.166 ohms and according to the manual the minimum is point 169 so we're really close we're a point zero zero three off I would say that is close enough for this equipment so let's test the other leg and we're pretty much the same for the other leg point one six six so that one is .002 under and I would say that is close enough in my book so really the only thing that's off here is the excitation winding it's not a lot off according to the manual though if it's below the minimum then replace the stator there's a problem with the stator so yeah that's what I'm leaning towards at this point you know I do have another capacitor it's not the 50 microfarad it's 35 and I'm tempted just to throw it in just on the off chance I had a bad capacitor granted the ratings wrong so the generator will not get up to full power but it would be interesting to see if it blows like the other ones so I'm going to pause it here I'm going to reconnect the control panel I'll put another capacitor in there and we'll try it one more time all right everything's put back together I've got a new capacitor installed it's 35 microfarad it's underrated assuming it doesn't blow right away we should get power we're not going to get full power but it should be enough to light that light bulb with any luck and I've also got the multimeters hooked up to measure voltage as well as the kilowatt foreign [Music] [Music] who would have guessed I half expected this to go up in Flames it didn't though it powered right up we were at 94 volts I put a 1500 watt load on it and nothing blew out so yeah a nine dollar amazon do-run capacitor that's meant for in HVAC system has the wrong microfarad rating ran this machine just fine so I would say we got a dud you know this one I think I got from eBay the seller said it was brand new and when I tested it it was on the very low end of passable so I would say this may have been New Old Stock most likely sitting on a shelf for a very long time and it just wasn't up to the task so let me pause it here I'm going to order another capacitor from a different seller at 50 microfarad and we'll give that a try so I just ordered another new capacitor different brand hopefully we'll have better luck with that it'll be here tomorrow so we're waiting for that I just want to finish up the engine I did get a couple parts for it one of them being this new pre-filter so we'll get that installed and although not absolutely necessary I did get a new gasket for the carb body the Nikki carbs they are very sensitive to this gasket it has to be perfect because it actually forms a bunch of passages where the fuel moves through and if it's not making a good seal you're going to have issues at some point with that carb so I'm just going to pop the top of the carb off again we'll put the new gasket in and just put this whole thing back together yeah not in the best shape and you can see these are some of the passages here I was talking about so that seal really needs to be good also I didn't remember this one being as bad as it was you know this is not a critical gasket I could get away with reusing this I think I'm gonna peel it off and we'll just make up a new one foreign that should be good enough doesn't have to be perfect on this side if you do want it perfect it's really the same process but do it on a piece of glass or like a stone like a piece of granite that'll make a nice flat surface anyway all we need to do now is get a piece of gasket material cut out a hole that's this diameter and then add these holes in the right spot so I've already double checked the diameter here we're at about 27 millimeters and the punch set I have has one that's at 28 so that should be fine a little bit too big is not an issue you just don't want it too small or you're going to restrict the flow almost so close yeah that should be good that's the easy part I think the harder part is locating the holes in the right spot and the way I do it is just with a piece of paper take a crayon kind of rub it on there and then you can see exactly where the holes need to be and then I'll put that paper on here and punch them out right so you can see the image there and there is our template so let's just punch the center out like that pretty close not sure what happened there but there's plenty of material left to just elongate that a bit the important thing is that it seals around this opening yeah that should work foreign assuming the capacitor fixes this generator it'll be really interesting to see what the power output looks like because this is advertised as a clean power generator and according to the documentation it does not produce more than six percent total harmonic Distortion and if that's true that'll be the lowest of any generator traditional generator that I've ever tested never mind a brushless generator so I think that's largely due to the fact that the stator is oversized the wire is actually made out of copper instead of aluminum like you see on a lot of newer generators and we also have a V-twin engine so there's going to be a lot less Ripple or cavitation with a single cylinder engine it only fires once and then the flywheel actually has to rotate twice before you get a power stroke again whereas this one every Revolution you get a power stroke so that theoretically in itself should make cleaner power one more thing worthy to note this has a huge plastic tank a lot of people like plastic tanks because they don't rust you know that said they do have a few downsides they can melt if they're too close to the engine or the exhaust and this company has taken a lot of time or given some thought as to where they place the tanks they put it far away from the engine and the other big failure point is this bushing right here they usually fail after about 10 or 15 years and these are almost always located on the bottom of the tank so when they fail the fuel leaks out potentially burning your generator to the ground and at the very least making a huge mess and with it like this even if this fails nothing is going to leak out I guess the only trade-off is you need a fuel pump to get it out of the tank but these they are cheap and I think it's something that really all plastic tank generators should have anyway there's really not much more to do I don't have the capacitor yet I think the one thing I do want to tackle is this right here it kind of bugs me this is such a nice machine it really needs a fuel valve right there and this filter it's about five years old so we get that swapped out as well so let's see if I can do this without making a huge mess here foreign capacitor showed up today this one was Dirt Cheap on Amazon you know that said the reviews were pretty good so I'm optimistic that this is going to solve our problem you know hopefully it will do better than the original replacement so yeah let's get this installed and try it out oh foreign setup as last time we get the light plugged in and turned on and the kilowatt on standby now the hope is we get 120 volts or more out of the 120 and the voltmeter here last time only made it about halfway I'd say about 180 volts on the 240 output so this time I'm looking for something closer to 240. [Applause] foreign not too bad without a load we're at 114 volts 61 Hertz I put a light 1500 watt load on it the voltage actually came up closer to 120 volts in the engine held at about 60 and a half Hertz so things are looking pretty good as far as the 240 output goes according to the meter we were in the green almost exactly on 240. so yeah I think this generator is a Survivor so I want to finish it up we'll just get the cover on I want to bring it outside we'll do some more extensive load testing I'm going to try to bring it up to the max and I also want to take a look at the sine wave see what it looks like and also measure the harmonic distortion foreign [Music] foreign watts of load on standby five space heaters and a heat gun on the end you know I have it balanced so half is on leg one and the other half on leg two So the plan is we'll get the engine started we'll let it warm up with a 3000 watt load and then we'll double it to 6000 watts and finally try bringing it up to 9000 watts and each step of the way we'll double check the output the volts the Hertz the harmonic Distortion and take a look at the sine wave [Applause] thank you [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] foreign I've got to say I did not believe the manufacturer's claim of seven percent total harmonic Distortion and Not only was it not seven percent it was less than seven percent it never even got close to that without a load we started at four point seven percent harmonic Distortion and under a full 9000 watt load it only came up to five point seven percent harmonic Distortion and that is the best hands down of any non-inverted generator I have ever tested you know as far as the engine goes it had no issues it started at 61.3 Hertz and under a full load it was holding just fine at 57.7 Hertz and the voltage no issues to report either it started at 117 volts at a moderate load it actually came up to close to 123 volts and then under a full load it was holding just fine at 116 volts so I was ready to shut this thing down and call it done unfortunately once the engine stopped I could hear I had another problem the starter motor never disengaged it was spinning the entire time you know I tried clicking the ignition switch a few times to get it to shut off and that did not happen so I ended up pulling the wire to get it shut down hopefully I didn't damage anything permanently so I'm going to actually tap the wire to the battery see if the starter motor gear still engages the ring gear and see if the starter solenoid is still stuck beautiful thankfully the engine still turns so I think we're okay as far as the ring gear and the starter gear the key's off though you know this is the Run position and this is the start so it should only be pulling current on the starter when you turn this to start so either the switch is bad or the starter solenoid and my money would be on the starter solenoid so let's get this inside we'll test this and figure out where the problem is foreign s here this one actually goes to the starter solenoid and it is loose which isn't a good thing but that is not our problem so I'm going to disconnect that wire and probably this wire too that's the feed from the battery and what I want to do is test for continuity between these two posts because the way this works is that there's an electromagnet in here and when it's energized by the ignition switch through this wire it sends a plunger up and connects these two contacts together and when you let go the coil de-energizes and that contact should return to the bottom and break the connection between these two posts so one of two things are going on here either the magnet is not de-energizing and we have a constant current holding the contacts closed or maybe it's just stuck at the top or maybe the contacts welded themselves and it's just holding it on the top so I want to get that wire off to if possible and that is also loose this wire is most likely to charge the battery because this feeds over to the battery it also might send power to the switch which then sends it back down here when you turn the switch on so we are completely isolated I've got the multimeter set just to make a tone when there's a connection and there should be no connection between these posts and there is so this solenoid is bad you know potentially I could jar it free if I try to energize the coil and de-energize it a few times but I don't think it's worth the chance we could have done a lot of damage here and if this is sticking it needs to be replaced so let's see I think to get it off it's just this bolt and there's another one right on the top and that should come right out of there foreign yeah we'll get a new one just out of curiosity I'm gonna double check these wires and I believe this one runs power up to the switch and the yellow one should bring it back down when I hit start so I'm going to do that now and if it's making a connection we should hear that meter beep and we do so we know the switch is fine these wires are fine and we kind of already knew that based on the tests we just did proving that this for some reason was stuck closed anyway let's get a new one of these and we'll finish it up so to erase any doubt I'm just going to test this real quick I've got the multimeter connected to each post and this is set to measure ohms and make an audible beep when a connection is made I have the ground connected to the battery negative and the positive will touch to the battery positive and when we energize the coil we should get a connection and we have one it's a little bit high 30 ohms that's a good connection we have an open even though it's energized still open not a great connection around 36 ohms open good connection so yeah this has issues it needs to be replaced I guess where we're waiting let's open up this bad starter solenoid this just for rivets holding it together so we'll open it up take a look see how it works and maybe see what the problem is [Music] [Music] looks like we're in interesting so we've got a spring I was expecting to see a little more than just this here we go so down here this is the electromagnet the positive it's coming in right there see if we can see that wire yes the positive comes in right there looks like it's insulated this one right here I'm thinking is the negative and the negative wire is actually connected to this plate so the spring actually must serve as the ground to the plate and puts negative on here which goes into that wire it looks like I need to clip that wire or potentially this will push through I think we'll just clip the wire because I'm not going to use this one again let's see if that lifts out there's not much to it when this coil of wire has current running through it it pushes this piece of metal up and when it does that it pushes on this piece of plastic right here you can hear it clicking so there's a set of contacts under here which Bridge these two posts see if this will come out yep and I just lost a piece let me grab it I found one of the parts that flew out and this is the one that does all the work this is just a copper bar and it gets pushed up by the electromagnet so when this is energized it sends this piece of metal up pushes against the plastic which in turn pushes this copper bar up and that is going to complete a circuit because on here you have two terminals one goes to the battery it's battery positive the other one goes to the starter so when these are bridged the current can flow to the starter and that happens when this bus bar gets pushed up and it makes contact with both those terminals now the failure I think in this case has to do with high resistance it most likely caused a lot of heat and you can see there's a mark right there and if you look on the underside of these terminals you can see the one on the left doesn't look too good it's a little crispy so this bus bar most likely welded itself lightly to the bar on the left and that's why it wouldn't shut off when the coil was de-energized so technically this could be reused if you wanted to clean it up and put it back together you know in my case the replacement part was available and it was only I think 25 dollars so that should be here in a few days so when it shows up we'll test it and get it on the machine so let's carefully have a little fun gonna try to energize this without creating a short let's see if this thing launches into space nope it's expecting more about a quarter inch of travel and that's it cool all right the new starter solenoids showed up today so I'm going to test this just to make sure it's good as we found out earlier with the capacitor new does not always mean good so we'll do the same test and when I energize it we should see a reading ideally at around one or two ohms now the other solenoid we were getting open quite a bit when tapping this so let's see what this one does point six is good 0.6 0.6 0.6 and 0.6 so yeah this one I think it's good foreign here this is a ground wire should be connected right there it's kind of funny that this one has the boot that one's always energized this one almost never has power yet this is the one that's protected kind of odd let's see if it still cranks [Music] beautiful [Applause] well guys that's pretty much a wrap you know this was supposed to be an easy fix usually when brushless generators stop making power it's due to a bad capacitor and that's exactly what I found so I thought this was a slam dunk put a new capacitor in and it should make power and of course that didn't happen the new capacitor blew out so that sent me chasing my tail you know I tested that stator very thoroughly using several different meters and I couldn't find a problem not only that the quality of the insulation on this machine is better than pretty much every machine I've ever tested so yeah that is saying something about the build quality here that and the fact that the THD is so low you know people are always asking me for names of non-inverter generators that make clean power and my answer is there are none at least not portable generators and this one it's pretty clean I mean 5.7 percent under a full load that's that's good so if you're looking for clean power and you don't want an inverter consider something like this now these aren't cheap either brand new something like this is over two thousand dollars and they make larger models I took a quick look I saw they had a 15 000 watt model and this company it is still in business I actually called them at one point I wanted to question them about what could blow that capacitor and surprisingly someone answered the phone right away an actual person I asked to speak to someone Technical and they transferred me within 10 seconds to that technical person and they actually knew what they were talking about so yeah pretty impressive anyway I hope this video helped someone thanks for watching foreign

Channel: James Condon

Views: 281,682

Keywords: 97F8069, Alternator, Bad Capacitor, Brushless Generator, Capacitor, Carburetor, Clean Power, Fixed, GEN-PRO, GPN-90E, Generator, Gillette Generator, Hertz, How To, How-To, Insulation Fault, Insulation Test, KLEEN-POWER, Load Test, Low THD. MEGGER, No Power, Ohms Law, Repair, Small Engine, Surging, Troubleshooting, Voltage Drop, Volts

Id: K20G_oqRcwk

Length: 94min 16sec (5656 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023