Powermate Generator No Power | New Stator Install

hey guys welcome back so today i brought home this parame generator this one was free and for good reason it doesn't make power now believe it or not this is 10 years old it looks brand new and only has 60 hours on the clock the story behind this actually a subscriber rob who runs a repair shop got this generator from a customer the customer was complaining that it didn't make power you know he ran the proper checks he checked the ohms which came back good he cleaned the slip rings inspected the brushes and replaced the avr still no power so at that point the customer said keep it and thankfully rob reached out to me to see if i could work some magic on it so hopefully i can but you know if you get a generator that's not making power i would say don't count on it making power more often than not it doesn't but sometimes it does so let me get set up a little bit better we'll break up the multimeter and see if we can't figure out what's making this generator sick hopefully this multimeter shows up okay i've got it set to ohms and i want to check the main windings that can be done actually through the outlets the 120 or the 240. i guess the only issue with the 120 is that there's two 120 legs here and you have to make sure you know which is leg one and leg two in this case i'm guessing leg one is here and leg two is here but a better way to do this is to actually use the 240 volt outlet the one with the prong here is the ground neutral is opposite and then leg one leg two so we'll just put this in the neutral and then the other lead into one of the legs and generally a generator like this should be less than 0.5 ohms 0.3 is usually what i see 0.3.4 so this leg is around 0.2 and my multimeter actually has 0.1 internal resistance so it's closer to 0.1 when you subtract that so that's actually a very low number that could be an issue i'll check the other leg and that one is a little bit high so if you don't know what the reading should be which i don't on this you want to see that the readings are consistent and in this case they're not too consistent you know potentially there is some corrosion on these contacts so let me check the 120s and see if we get a different number 0.2 ohms and point i guess we'll call that a 0.3 but there is a difference between the legs i mean say 0.3.4 and this one was 0.2 so that is very suspect you know there might be an issue with the stator so let's get the cover off the stator and take a look okay well nothing's jumping out at me this looks very clean in here there's no dust no corrosion i don't see any broken ropes so let's get this avr out of the way so we can get a better look yeah nothing's jumping out at me the wire looks good no broken ropes no black marks i'd say the only issue is that you can see the winding here isn't too clean so it's a little bit sloppy also up there wasn't wound very well so yeah maybe there is an issue with the stator but let's keep going i need to get these wires off i want to isolate the main windings and then we'll do some testing more testing on the main windings as well as the winding supplying power to the avr and there's two sets of white wires on here it shouldn't matter which way they go back but i am going to mark the top white wire which that's that one and that's that one so that way when i put it back together it'll be a hundred percent the way that it was these two i'm going to leave connected for now not too concerned about them usually there is an extra winding when you have a fuel solenoid like there is on this generator so most likely this is the one for that and there's also a 12 volt charging circuit on the front panel so most likely that's what the other one's for but neither one of these is going to prevent the generator from powering up it's most likely one of these windings or potentially a bad stator but the stator looks fine so i don't think it's a bad stator most likely it's a bad dpe winding i'm gonna check the dpe winding first so that is this plug right here the two blue wires of the dpe winding and usually it comes in at one and a half ohms and we're at 1.6 and this meter has a internal resistance of 0.1 so we're at 1.5 dpe winding actually looks good let's check the sense winding that usually comes in pretty similar to the stator so i would say around 0.3.4 and that's pretty good point two then we'll check the main windings again from down here so we'll do leg one 0.3.4 that's pretty good and like two yeah so it it's actually not too bad it is a bit higher i'd say it's like 0.1 ohms higher and that's i would say acceptable so things seem to be pretty good i am going to actually check each winding to ground in each winding to each other to see if there's an insulation failure so we'll start with the blue wires the dpe winding then touch this to ground and there's no connection now do the sense winding and that is not good so that is the yellow and green wire that is the sense winding and yeah that could be the issue so the sense winding is usually off the main winding so let's check the main winding see if there's any fault to ground and there is check the other winding yeah so that's the issue the main windings are shorted to ground so the stator is definitely bad unfortunately um let's check to see if they're shorted to each other so we'll do leg one to leg two and they are shorted together let's check it to the dpe winding no connection and of course the sense winding i mean that's that's usually part of the main winding anyway let's just see if it's connected to the dpe and it's not we'll check the main windings and it's connected to both so yeah unfortunately i would say the stator is bad unless i'm missing something so let's cut this zip tie we'll disconnect these just to completely be sure that we're isolated and yeah this might be a quick video okay so now we're 100 isolated let's check this again to ground yeah we still have a connection so okay no choice we need to take the stator apart and just see how bad it is but it's it's not good [Music] they don't exactly make this easy i mean it should just be pulling those four long bolts that hold the stator on getting the feet loose and then sliding that out with a puller but this exhaust is attached right here and this i thought initially was part of the heat shield but it's not it's part of the exhaust system so the exhaust actually has to come off before we can get access to the stator but i can't access the bolts because of the shield the shield won't come out unless i remove part of the governor spring and some bolts and stuff up here so they've made it a little more difficult than it should be [Applause] just going to use the gear puller to get the bearing out of the end housing it doesn't look half bad until you get to right right there so yeah unfortunately this stator is bad i think we knew that anyway but now we can see it so i'm going to pause it here i'm going to take a look online and see what parts are still available for this generator well parts are an issue for this machine i did a google search on this model number came up pretty much empty really the only things that came up were carburetors and ignition coils and just kind of the miscellaneous honda clone stuff that you would see but none of it's specific to this model generator so you know i then went to generx website generec acquired powermate back in 2014 and typed in this model number and it came back with no results so i ran the search again just taking off the last digit of this model number and it did come back with the results but it was not the right generator so finding a suitable replacement for this just became a lot more challenging but this is a very common honda clone setup it's on a lot of generators from home light to duramax champion predator ryobi and generac and most of those vendors do not supply replacement parts with the exception of generac and ryobi so i checked their sites generac specifically i looked for the gp 5500 the powerhead is still available but it's about 450 dollars and that doesn't include shipping and tax so that's pretty much not an option this generator is not worth that much i then went to the ryobi site and looked at their 5500 watt generator and to my shock the stator they were selling for 135 dollars plus eight dollars shipping and tax which is a steal i've never seen a stator that price before so i went ahead and ordered it and even if it doesn't work out here it's a good deal i'll use it on something but i'm cautiously optimistic like i said this is a very common setup i think it'll fit but i can tell you already if it fits it's going to be the outer diameter that fits on that bell housing the stator on the ryobi seems to be a bit longer and if that's the case then that's going to have a domino effect meaning if it is in fact longer the rotor that's on here isn't going to work out we're going to need a longer rotor which ryobi does sell as well for 85 dollars so again not a bad price but we would need a longer rotor longer rotor bolt longer stator bolts and potentially a new end housing i don't know if the ryobi ball bearing is going to fit in this end housing won't know till we try so i'm not afraid to try i think as albert einstein once said if you haven't failed it's because you haven't tried anything new and you know at that price i couldn't pass it up so i did place the order the stator's in this box so i'm going to cut it out of the box we will measure things up and see if there's any chance of making this work well i may have hit the lottery on this one the length of the ryobi stator is about five and an eighth and the length on this it's a little bit harder to tell because some of the stator is under the lip here but when i measure it up we're at i'd say about five to maybe five and an eighth so we're within an eighth i'd say lengthwise and that that should be fine now i still don't know if this is going to fit with the outer dimension as well as the inner but i think that is a standard size so let me try slipping this on and see see how we make out yeah it looks like it's a pretty good fit the stator slid on without any resistance from the rotor and as you can see the clearance is really tight from the rotor to the stator and that's that's the way it should be so i think the inner diameter is fine and as far as the bell housing itself goes i mean i think i think we're going to be okay i can't actually get it to slide all the way in until i get the end housing on and then i can use a dead blow hammer to just tap on the end and hopefully that pops into place to get the end housing off it's pretty easy there's two seven millimeter bolts that go all the way through the stator and held on with a nut in the back yeah this one does come in at five inches so it is an eighth of an inch shorter and it doesn't sound like much but it could definitely be an issue the rotor that's on that generator is expecting a stator this size and if you put one on that's an eighth of an inch longer it's gonna cause two issues that i can think of first is that the end housing is going to be an eighth of an inch further away from that ball bearing so it's not going to hold it quite as well with that said it's only an eighth of an inch i don't think that's going to be an issue but the bigger problem might be the alignment of the brushes by having this an eighth of an inch further out the contact with the brushes will now be shifted by an eighth of an inch and i don't think we have an eighth of an inch this is a better look at what i'm talking about the brushes were riding right there so if we shift everything by an eighth of an inch we're right up on the edge here and yeah it it might still work i think we need to at least try but i think this rotor is gonna have to be replaced well the good news is the stator went on to the bell housing but you know as i feared the ball bearing is falling short of where it should be and it's actually closer to a quarter of an inch instead of an eighth and same thing on the brushes i installed the brushes tried to stick the camera in there so you could take a look it's a bit blurry but i think you can see the brushes are pretty much missing the slip rings by a quarter of an inch so i'm going to place an order we'll get the ryubi rotor and hopefully not run into any more complications okay the rotor is on its way it'll be here in a few days the only thing i need to do at this point is just get the old rotor off it's kind of hard to show you the frame's in the way but i'm going to get the engine at bottom dead center on the compression stroke fill that cylinder with rope and then we'll be able to use that to lock the engine up and pop that stator off so nope the good news is we have threads it's an m12 1.75 doesn't seem to go in very far so i'm just going to chase those threads with a tap and then we'll find the right size rod and try pushing this off so so what i just did there was insert the rotor bolt and slide it in until it hits the crankshaft at that point you know i marked it where it exits the rotor and then you want to use a rod cut slightly less than that length and these are ones i've cut up previously for other projects this one here i thought was the winner but not so fast this bolt is a pretty large diameter and these rods look to be the same size so if i just put this in and torque down the bolt to pop it off this is actually going to push into the threads on the crankshaft so i can't use this method instead i'm going to use water a little bit of teflon and some hydraulic pressure to hopefully pop that off so being a little lazy here but the best way to do this is to get that engine off stand it completely up that way when you fill that rotor shaft with water there's no air in it and if there's any air in there it's not going to do what we're looking to do which is push that rotor off instead it's just going to compress the air and that's it so i'm hoping at this angle i can get enough water in there and then when i go to tighten the bolt down with any luck whatever air is in there right at the end will come out before the bolt seals that worked out pretty well now all we need is the new rotor something showed up in the mail today and i think it is the new rotor so i'm kind of excited probably more nervous i can think of a number of things that aren't going to work out so let's get it out of the box and see see if it's gonna work okay well i had a lot of concerns ordering this part they don't list any of the dimensions and in fact when looking at the parts diagram they listed the ball bearing and the fan separately from the rotor so i only ordered the rotor i wasn't sure if i was going to get the whole thing but i did so that was the first concern not an issue the second one was the ball bearing itself the outer diameter has to be the same in order to use the end housing that came with this generator so i measured this one up it comes out to about 47.1 millimeters which is what we're at and the new one thankfully if i can get this foam out of the way comes in at the same number 47.1 so we're good with the ball bearing and then lastly the actual rotor bolt itself for the ryobi listed it as an eight millimeter bolt in width and the one that came off this machine was a 10 millimeter so i was pretty convinced the ryobi bolt wasn't going to work out but now that it's here i can see it's actually the right size diameter and when you look at the length it is a bit longer which is exactly what we needed so the bolts gonna work this rotor is gonna work and we also have the new stator bolts to go with all that so i'm gonna clean this off we'll get it on get the stator on and hopefully get this thing making power [Music] beautiful uh i don't have a torque spec on this bolt usually i bring it up to about 23 foot pounds but this bolt is quite a bit wider than what i normally see so i'm going to bring it up to 25 probably closer to 30 in the end okay that's 25. go for 30. yeah that actually feels good could probably go a bit more we'll bring it up to probably closer to 35. yeah 35 it is yeah the new bolts are actually too long we run out of thread before the bolts tight so gonna have to stick with the originals i think all right i got the rope out of the cylinder so the engine should spin these bolts are now torqued down to 90 inch pounds i'm going to pull the engine over i want to make sure there's no scraping down here the rotor should spin freely it should not hit anything [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and we're good here's an up close look at what that ball bearing is supposed to look like in the end housing also i did put one of the feet on just loosely and i was worried that the holes weren't going to line up on the frame due to the fact that the stator is just a tiny bit longer but i don't think we need to do any modifications i think that'll bolt up as is just fine there are differences between this old stator and the new the important parts are the same which is the avr hookup as well as the main winding out but we do not have these extra coils one of them is for the fuel solenoid which isn't critical and the other one is for the 12 volts that supply this like cigarette type plug that you'd find in a car so that's not going to work not a big deal but i think the bigger concern here is just what's going on with the main windings the old stator had four wires coming out and then they connected here and ran up to the outlets the same four wires we got red two whites and a black which match down here now the new stator only has three wires coming out we got one black two and then we got a white so what they've done here is they've actually commoned up these white wires coming out of the stator so we only have one which is fine you don't need four but you do want to be careful when reconnecting this because this is kind of where the limit of my ac knowledge comes to an end and as far as what's safe and what's not we only need one of these white wires we don't need two and potentially we could just comment these up and connect that to the one white wire now you do want to be absolutely sure you know what wire is what i've already tested this with the multimeter and i'll show you that in a minute but testing for continuity you get a connection between these two so you want to be absolutely sure that you know what wire goes to where on the receptacle before hooking it up to the stator and same with the stator wires you want to make sure you understand where the 240 is going to come out and where the neutral is because if you get this wrong you could create a short in your stator and your stator is going to last all of about 20 seconds so what i guess what i don't know is by doubling these up to the white they then go up to this panel right here and then they get combined again in the panel somewhere so you know having two paths for the neutral i don't know if that's a good idea or not i could connect just one but then you have a live wire down here in the generator head so ideally i would just actually remove this wire altogether so i'm gonna get this panel pulled out there's four bolts one in each corner and see if we can't pop this back off and see what's going on for wiring inside okay got the multimeter set to ohms i'm going to put one of the leads on the white wire and one of them on one of these black wires we get 0.4 ohms check the other black wire 0.4 that is good and now between the black wires we should get twice that and we do so that confirms the white wire is the neutral and we have leg one leg two now this these are the wires going up to the outlets and you want to be very sure of what these wires are the color coding on some of these is pretty crazy and don't doesn't necessarily make sense but what i'm expecting to see here is that two of these wires are basically a dead short and you want to make sure you know which ones those are because if you put those on a single coil you're essentially just connecting the coil to itself and the stator is going to melt down so pretty sure it's the white wires we'll just set it to make an audible beep and the white wires are basically the same there is a direct connection we can just check these others to make sure the black wire we got nothing red wire nothing we'll check the other white wire to the black and the red so nothing so these two are in fact connected together up in the control box so i want to take that control panel off we'll see if i can open it up ideally i'd cut this out and just leave the one white wire so we'd end up with three wires coming down from the panel that corresponds with the three wires coming out of the stator [Music] yeah there's a lot of wires in here but the good news is it's pretty easy to fix this these are the wires coming up that go down to the stator and these are the two white wires in question now this white wire goes over to the 120 outlet there's a jumper wire right there that connects to the other 120 and then it's jumpered again over to the 240 and then this is the other wire here coming up from the stator also being doubled up on the 240 so i'm going to leave most of this stuff alone but this wire right here that's the one i'm going to cut remove it from the outlet and just pull it out then we'll put this panel back together i'll just double check that we have a good neutral connection to all the outlets and we should be good to move on all right i've got one lead on the white wire on the one that exits down by the stator i'm just going to test all the neutrals make sure we're still good yeah and we're good you you so okay well i was worried since the stator is longer that this wouldn't fit but it looks like we have just enough clearance that i'm going to be able to get this onto the bracket [Music] so so so all right it's the moment of truth here before committing and running this on gas i'm just going to pull the air box sorry the air box cover off give it a little squirt of starting fluid and hook up a light i want to make sure that the wiring is good that we see the light turn on for a second and if that looks good then i'll hook up the fuel and do a real test [Applause] nice foreign 125 volts 55 56 hertz so i'm gonna bump the speed up a bit [Applause] it's good [Applause] okay very nice uh the engine speed was a bit slow but that's because i took some of the tension off that governor spring when i reinstalled this cover so bumped the engine speed up to 61.3 hertz the voltage was on the high side of normal it was 125 volts i do want to bring that down just a bit but when loading it up to 3000 watts things did quite well the voltage stayed steady and the hertz dropped to about 58.8 so overall considering where we started we're doing very well and i was surprised actually that these led lights were working on the panel i thought potentially by emitting this 12-volt circuit that those wouldn't work but they are working fine it's still kind of a tbd on that hour meter it i thought it was advancing but i'm not sure so i do need to run it a bit longer and see if that meter has power so let's get the avr adjusted we'll restart it and actually want to check the voltage here at the 240 make sure that that's good as well usually it's counterclockwise to bring the voltage down but not always one full turn does about two volts sometimes it does 20 so in this case we're at 125 volts so i'm going to turn it two full turns counterclockwise it should bring it down close to 120 maybe 121 volts [Applause] that's good it's 121.3 five perfect [Music] [Applause] okay the voltages are good unfortunately the hour counter does not look to be advancing so we did lose that with the 12 volts potentially i could get something in there to correct that but for now i think this is a win i'm going to re-secure the avr we'll get this back inside and finish it up [Music] well that just about does it i think the exception is the end cap on the powerhead and i'm gonna leave that off for right now when editing this video together i noticed when this started for the very first time with this power head i heard what sounded like arcing and i haven't heard it since [Applause] but i do want to do some more tests on it i want to make sure that the brushes here aren't arcing if they are it's going to lead to overheating and failure what happens is this plastic here that holds the brushes will literally just melt and then you lose power so i want to make sure that this is solid before selling it to someone and as far as the rest of it goes you know i was kind of bummed that this hour counter doesn't work there are other options for this that do run off of ac so you know i took a quick look on amazon there was a few for around 13 that may or may not fit and i also looked at some power adapters that potentially could just be tapped into the 120 side to create 12 volts to power this as well but you know in the end i've probably invested close to 240 dollars in this generator and it's well worth it i mean this thing is practically new it only has 60 hours on the engine but this generator used probably isn't going to sell for much more than 400 i'd say 450 on you know the day after a storm and uh yeah i've got a gotta cut off the money spend at some point so the arm eater honestly is not that important and neither is the 12 volt outlet so i think i'm gonna call it right here guys so i hope this video helps someone thanks for watching actually not quite done yet i think it was the handles rattling at startup let me show you they're both loose that one's a lot worse so i'm just going to tighten those up we'll start it up one last time and make sure everything's good okay [Music] [Music] [Applause] okay well i didn't see or hear anything unusual this time so i think we're good i'm just going to get that end cap on and then i'll call it done and now i'm done so hope this video helped someone thanks for watching

Channel: James Condon

Views: 139,750

Keywords: AVR, Automatic Voltage Regulator, Bad Stator, Fix, Generator Not Making Power, Generator, Generator Not Generating, Generator Testing, No Power, Ryobi Generator, Small Engine Repair, Stator Install, Stator Replacement, Stator Testing, Troubleshooting, Voltage Adjustment

Id: OT2etRMdTVc

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021