Rare Vintage 1950s Homelite Generator - Will It Run and Make Power Again?

you know Goodbye YouTube guys [Music] hey guys welcome back so today working on this Homelite 3000 watt generator this one was given to the channel by Stanley he found this actually at the dump someone had thrown it away after I would say a long time of storing it quite well you know this machine I haven't quite placed the Vintage on it you know I'm guesstimating about 1950 from what I can tell this two-stroke engine was actually made by Homelite during World War II it is a model 24a and they sold that engine all the way up to about 1970. anyway this has a lot of stuff on it I'm not familiar with so it is going to be a challenge I did take a look for spare parts online and came up pretty much empty couldn't find a user manual never mind a service manual so I think we're on our own on this one anyway I want to check for spark and compression this is a points and condenser so I'm sure that's going to need a bit of work but before I pull the engine over I think we need to deal with what's going on in that tank it smells really bad and is varnished up pretty severely you know someone left fuel in the tank and the tank is not in very good shape and in the off chance that the carb is any good I don't want to pull the engine over and suck that stuff into the carbs so I think I'm going to start there let's just get the tank and carb out of the way we'll pull the engine over check for spark and compression and go from there looks like there might have been a pre-filter at one point around here which is long gone the filter is still usable I'm gonna have to be very careful here this tube it is very petrified usually I would just cut something like that off and replace it later you know in this case I'm not so sure that's a good idea replacement parts they're not existent and also I believe there are some pickup tubes coming down from the carburetor into the tank and I don't want to damage those either so I'm going to try to move one of these clips down and then we'll see if we can pry with a screwdriver to release the carburetor from this tube actually that was easier than I thought I thought it was home free with this tank and I can't get it off actually the bottom of the tank isn't the bottom of the tank where the carburetor goes in on the top those tubes go down actually beyond the bottom of the tank into what looks like some sort of a bowl and that bowl is hitting this spring so I can't actually get the tank out so I think the best plan of attack here might be to remove that bolt for the spring and that should allow me to get some clearance or move that spring out of the way just a bit to allow that tank to come out this one's probably not metric it's also not half an inch okay actually a 15 millimeter fits pretty well yeah that wasn't too bad so I'm just going to leave the tank and the carb over here for now we'll come back to that later for now let's check for spark so before checking for spark let's just get the plug out so that way we're not fighting compression and we'll also get a little bit of oil in that cylinder you know I have no idea how long it's been since this engine was started plug looks decent no rust Champion plug J Ash 6j interesting there's a little port on the intake manifold kind of squirting out some oil so that is most likely an Impulse line of some sort for the carburetor so this might have a diaphragm pump on it which I'm hoping it doesn't because I'm sure that would be shot by this point all right let's check for spark the spark tester has a quarter inch Gap so if we have strong Spark which I doubt we do it should be able to jump that Gap so let me kill the lights we'll pull the engine over see if we get any Spark I think that's enough with the lights we still have a bit of light but hopefully we can see that a little better so I'm going to pull the engine over this engine spins counterclockwise which is different from Modern engines so let's see what we get [Applause] wow we've got Spark how I'm not sure let me just pull the engine over one more time make sure we have consistent Spark and we do let's check compression so on a two-stroke engine I would expect at least 120 PSI it could be higher but any lower and I don't think it'll run very well so let's pull it over a few times and see what we get one pull we're at 110. so that's pretty good and actually this cord I would say is a little short but so it's hard to get a good pull on it but let's try a couple more see if we can get up to 120. yeah just about 120. on two poles so not bad I think it'll run we've got Spark we've got compression you know I say we add a little bit of fuel maybe plug a light in see what we get let's give this a try put a little bit of fuel down the cylinder I might squirt a little bit in here as well you know I had wanted to hook up a light but these receptacles they're not like anything I've ever seen I don't have anything currently that'll fit in there so for now this will just be a test of the engine nice a little smoky in here after running for about one second but we've got a runner I mean to be honest I thought this was going to be more of a challenge to get running it is such an old machine first pull started right up so compression no issues spark no issues power output that is a TBD you know I do need to get some adapters so we can adapt this to something a little bit more modern so I'm going to order those up and I think we're waiting for that to arrive we'll just turn our attention to the tank and the carb see if we can't save both of those so I think I'm going to start just by cleaning a little bit of this junk off the outside of the tank and then we'll pour out the contents put some nuts and bolts inside shake it around and see what that gets us foreign actually going to switch over to WD-40 a lot of this is just oily dirt and WD-40 does a really good job of breaking that stuff up this tank does not have a lip on it which is good it'll make cleaning it a lot easier a lot of newer tanks have lips on it so you can't actually pour everything out that's inside the tank and there's a look at what came out of the tank definitely a good vintage but not so much for running an engine anyway we can now see the bottom of the tank and yeah it doesn't look great so we're going to start simple here we'll just add some nuts and bolts a bit of water shake it around rinse and repeat do that a few times and hopefully that'll knock a lot of that rust out of there foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] this is by far the worst tank I've ever done the nuts and bolts they're coming out just covered in mud so I'm gonna clean these off a bit and actually add some Degreaser in there I usually don't like using that because when I shake it around it it Foams up and Bubbles up and becomes a lot less effective as far as the nuts and bolts shaking around but given how oily this stuff is coming out yeah I think we're going to need some concentrated Degreaser to help break that up foreign we are making progress believe it or not I may have underestimated how bad the tank was this is a bunch of the mud that has come out so far and yeah it's it's not good so I'm gonna skip ahead a bit I'm gonna work at this a bit longer and hopefully come back and show you a clean tank but not holding my breath on this one it's pretty bad well I know it's the middle of the summer but had to break out the snow blower it has the perfect size wheel and it travels nice and slow so I've got some bolts and water in the tank let's get the engine started and just let it run oh [Music] let's see how we're making out here it's been 20 minutes about shaking this thing around I did put a bit of Degreaser in there because the stuff that's in there is very oily and what I want is to try to get down to bare metal then we'll use a little bit of evaporos to finish it up yeah not looking too good that's after 20 minutes of tumbling on that snowball or wheel and I really don't see any clean metal at this point so this tank is really really bad by far the worst I have tried to revive so I would say it's going to need quite a bit more time spinning to have any chance of cleaning up so I'm going to let it run I would say for at least another hour we'll check back see if any progress has been made all right it's been another 30 minutes tumbling on the snow blower I thought I'd take a peek in here with the boroscope so right now we're looking down the length and that is the top you can see the sides actually have fairly clean metal and then the bottom which is kind of what we're trying to knock down right now so yeah it's getting there doesn't look great it looks like we have a brass tube coming in I believe it's from this not exactly sure what that is and the deeper part of the tank I should be looking at it right now but I'm not seeing anything so I think that could be an issue you know also that brass tube it looks like it might have another tube connected to it running over through that baffle to the other end so I'm not sure what that's about potentially it's some sort of event not sure anyway I think the next move here is to open up the bottom there is actually a huge bolt right there there's a smaller one right here you know I'm thinking this is just full of junk and that's why I can't see with the borescope down into here you know as far as that brass tube you know what it's doing I'm not sure there is a little hole right there so yeah maybe event it looks like there were some screws painted over there so potentially I could get that out if I had to but for now let's just try to get this opened up see if that gives me any insight as to what's going on down here what do you think the odds are of this coming out I would say not good foreign it turned it's hard to say but I think this might have been a fuel filter at one point I see what looks like a pickup down there possibly a screen right there and there is a screw there looks like we can take this whole thing apart so I'm actually going to bring this back outside we'll spray this down with water get a better look at it and just spray in these openings here and just try to flush that junk out of there so the good news is nothing is blocked here I squirted water through the drain and it went into the tank and also came through a passage over to where the filter was now this tank obviously it's not going to clean up perfect so this filter is going to be a critical component so I'm going to try to take it apart and yeah that screw is already tearing itself up so yeah this is not going to be an optional component I mean the tank is not going to clean up all the way so we need a filter let me stick this in the vise and maybe spray some penetrating oil on there and see if there's any chance of getting that apart in one piece well I can tell you right now I don't think any amount of PB Blaster is going to save this that screw started to break apart just trying to unscrew it while holding this in my hand and of course in the vise I can apply a lot more Force which just means it's going to fall apart that much faster but I'm not that concerned about the screw I mean ultimately I want to get the filter off get what's left of the screw out and we can just replace it with a new no it's tearing it up guess last stitched effort we'll try the impact and just finish the job just trying to find the bit that fits the best yeah that's not going to come out I'm going to drill it out try to save the filter foreign I think I'm gonna have to give up on saving this filter it's not letting go and I have a feeling it's more like a cartridge meaning this whole bobbin is kind of supposed to come out maybe there we go and there we go I was hoping it would come out in one piece you know that said I think the center brass part is reusable we'll just have to find some other screen to put on there at some point and as far as the screw goes let's see if we can get that to come out of there yep now why that wouldn't come out before don't know but I guess the good news is we can get a new screw to put in there we still have the top and the bobbin so we can refit it with something assuming we make it that far all right I think we're done it's been another half hour and in total I'd say over an hour and a half so at this point I'm just going to drain it out rinse it out with some water and get some evapor rust on there and just let it sit for a couple days and see what that does for us it's cleaned up pretty well that part [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] foreign let's see what surprises are in here I'm going to start by removing these two screws they just hold on to this pipe right here that holds the air filter in place foreign was on there pretty tight there's really not much to this car but looks like there's an adjustable Jet right here there is a bolt right here which I'm assuming is where the fuel gets picked up and then drawn into the carburetor now there are three tubes here not really sure the purpose of that one of them has an opening I'm assuming that's the fuel pickup and this one not sure what's going on here there's actually a tube that comes down there's a u and then it goes right back up and this is actually the largest tube so yeah it's a bit of a mystery haven't found any documentation on this carb I'm going to start just by turning this one in to see where it's set at right now that's one turn one and a quarter that hole right there that's where the fuel was squirting out when I was rotating the engine not on here but on the intake pipe so that receives a pulse and where it goes I guess that is the question and what does it do so let's get this bolt out maybe that'll give a little insight as to what that is doing and it does not look like there's a diaphragm in here so I believe What's Happening Here is that the tank is being pressurized by crank case pressure and pushing fuel up through one of these tubes and this looks like the main jet if I had to guess and the needle goes down to restrict the flow at least I think how that's how that works uh let's see what else here there's a screw right here goes to a passage here over on the primer side so let's get that out of there that was loose and we got a spring I wonder if there's a check ball in there let me get the light potentially it's a check ball yeah I say we remove the primer feels pretty loose like it's not actually doing anything might be a bad seal in there that's pretty much it not much to this carburetor and I guess the good news is it it looks pretty clean you know this actually I think would run the engine without too much effort I think the big Wilds card here are these tubes you know how clogged are they and of course the tank this works together with the tank to draw the fuel you know I don't think it's a fuel pump it's a pressurized tank so if we don't have a tank then whether this carb is good or not it doesn't really matter because it's never going to feed fuel up so I'm going to get out the carb cleaner just spray through these passages see where they go and see if these tubes are by any chance clear so let's start with the impulse hole right here see where that passage leads yeah and I would have to say that's clogged we got a passage down here let's see where that goes and that little hole right there looks like it's connecting over to the main jet just see if this tube is clear and now it is not clear at all so not sure what to think of that it almost looks like there is metal there like it's not actually a blockage so I've been going through the carb just kind of studying it trying to understand how this works and think I'm just about there so my earlier statement about this being a pressurized tank 100 not correct you can see there is a through hole right there that would go down into the tank so there is no way that this is a pressurized tank now normally this should be sitting on here and capped off this brass tube right here actually goes up to where the air filter is and really all it is is a tube so there is a low pressure in this area as the air is coming in and with this cap on it creates a slight low pressure there now the cap doesn't fit well so it's not going to do a whole lot you know I'm sure it's just worn out potentially or maybe that's the way it's supposed to be anyway the main way this is supposed to function is that the port right here the crankcase from the engine is pressurizing that and I believe it goes down to this tube right here the one that has the hook and then goes into this larger tube right here and by sending basically air pressure through the big tube it's going to force fuel up the tube and it actually comes out here this is just a cap but the tube isn't capped tight it's just almost like a dust cap so fuel will come out of that tube it'll fill this bowl and anything over the height of this other brass tube down there goes back to the tank so this is constantly filling up with fuel the excess is returned to the tank and there's a hole in the bottom right there that little hole and that goes over to the main jet which gets sucked up into the throat of the carb and of course it's metered with this needle so that is mostly how this carb works now I've double checked the tubes the big tube is clear actually this little tube is clear now it was initially clogged up and this actually was there's a check ball on there you can just see it that was stuck as well so I freed that up that is part of the primer circuit and it actually will suck fuel up and into this compartment which earlier I thought I saw a check ball and I was wrong it's was actually a little needle and that would be attached to this screw that we pulled out just like that and as far as I can tell this is actually only used when priming the carburetor so when you pump the pump it forces fuel up this one with the check ball it forces the needle open and sends it out this little passage here filling up that bowl and that's pretty much how this carb Works in a nutshell now I went through all the passages they are all clear except the most important one the one that accepts the engine pressure this tube is clogged and because it's bent you know I can't really get in there to clear it and I've been trying to blow carb spray and air through that hole and it is plugged solid you know unfortunately it also only goes in about half an inch and then it must make a turn because yeah it's a hard stop so without the engine pressure making it to here that's essentially the main mechanism that this thing draws fuel from the tank and without that we're in trouble so anyway I've gone through the card pretty well with the exception of that tube I think we're good as far as the rest of the parts go you know we really only have this main jet which wasn't clogged so that's actually in pretty good shape and then we have the primer mechanism itself which seemed a little loose you know there's probably some seals in here that can be replaced you know whether it still works or not you know I'm not sure but honestly that's the least of my worries I mean worst case we can just put some fuel in the bowl and the system is essentially primed you know we don't need the pump to do that so I'm gonna soak this in the ultrasonic hopefully it fits and I'm going to let it sit in there for a long time hopefully we can break up what's in here to make this carb viable foreign s it cleaned up really well unfortunately that passage right there did not free up so I ran it through a bunch of Cycles over the course of six hours and you can see it took all the pain off it and finally we got some carb cleaner to go through that passage but now that it has we have a whole different problem let me show you so I'm going to spray some carb spray through that port and just keep an eye on this third tube right here if the tube is clear the carb spray should go down the tube and exit into the larger tube where we see it trip out but that's not what we're going to see here so did you see how that small tube is now completely soaked there is a hairline fracture starting right at the top and running down the length of this pipe so yeah it's never going to work like this so even though I think the carb is good the tube is bad and it has to be replaced to have any chance of recovering this carburetor so I guess I'm going to try to get it out so there's a little blob of solder down there and I'm assuming once that is removed the tube can be removed from the carb body I don't see anything holding it in place I think it's just pressed in there so I've got a torch it's actually way oversized for this little pipe so I'm going to start with a soldering iron try to separate these two pipes and assuming we can get that far you know I think I might cut it in the middle we'll remove the lower portion and then try to pull out what's left attached to that carb body so I'm adding some new solder hoping that it will help with thermal transfer to get the old stuff out of there but that is not the case because it can't even melt the new stuff once it's on here the copper it's just wicking the heat away too fast so I think we need the torch much easier [Music] foreign [Music] I've tried pretty nicely to persuade this to come out and it's not budging so I'm gonna up the force a bit and apply unreasonable Force so either the tubes gonna break or it's going to come out foreign yay we got pretty lucky on this one I thought for sure I was going to break it and we'd be drilling it out you know instead the tube came out cleanly so we just need a new one of these and it looks to be an eighth of an inch at our diameter and this stuff is readily available so I'm going to order up a bunch of it because getting this 180 degree Bend without kinking the line most likely it's going to take a few attempts so we'll get some extra we'll try to bend it into shape get it installed and I think we'll be all set on the carb front so while waiting for the tubing I think we need to change plan of attack on this tank the evapor rust it's been in there now for just over 24 hours and usually evapor rust makes quick work a rust within 24 hours you should see a very big difference and with the amount that's in there the evapor rust should have turned dark and we should not be able to see the bottom so that has not happened at all it still looks like new and the bottom of the tank is unchanged so I'm thinking that is not rust at least not what's exposed right now so I'm gonna actually pour the evapor rust out and try something a little bit different you know I have some acetone or actually I thought I did the cans empty so we'll skip that for now but that's okay because I found some mineral spirits which cleans up stain and varnish and that's exactly what that stuff smells like and looks like when it first came out so the can well it isn't full so we're gonna have to buy some more if it works but for now let's just get the evapor rust out clearly that's not working we'll put what we have with the mineral spirits in give that a little bit of time and see if it improves things at all it's been just over 36 hours and it's definitely doing something you can see it's no longer clear and if I tilt it away you can see what the bottom of the tank looks like now it doesn't look great but if you look kind of in the bottom of your screen just to the right I scraped that lightly with the screwdriver and it got the chunks off so yeah I think we are just dealing with some varnish so I did pick up some mineral spirits some more so we can top it off also got a can of acetone so we can give that a try if it comes to it and I also picked up some ultimate paint and varnish remover it seems to be quite strong potentially this might be what we need but I think for now I'm just going to drain this out bring it back outside put some Degreaser shake the nuts and bolts see if we can get any more chunks out and then depending upon how that goes I'll kind of make a decision here as far as do we stick with that or do we try something else thank you so the mineral spirits it's it's working you know it is slow going you know I think it is softening the top layer and that's what I was just able to wash out you know that said looking in there it really didn't look visually any better so I did just pour in a bit of this paint and varnish stripper or remover and I've got it oriented in such a way that it's mostly pooled in this corner so I'm going to let it sit for a bit and then we'll check in on it see if it's having any effect it's only been about 10 minutes and it's actually having a pretty good effect this stuff went in white and you can see it's already the color of that varnish if I tilt the tank away I can now see parts of the tank in that corner that I've never seen before so I think I'm gonna load up and let it sit for an hour or so we'll dump it out and see what that gets us well it's been about two hours and initially you know I wasn't sure I had seen a whole lot of progress but then I just reached in there and kind of poked the bottom with the screwdriver didn't even have to scrape it in a whole bunch of stuff just lifted right out with almost no effort so I'm going to pour out the paint stripper just into a container so I can reuse it later and then I want to get Degreaser in there again just shake it around and see if we can get any more of that out all right it's definitely a noticeable change let me bring it back inside where the lighting's a little better and show you what I see here so I can actually see metal now and if I pan as much as I can going across the tank you see lots of bare metal minimal rust so yeah this stuff's working great so I'm going to pour it back in let it sit for another couple hours and I think we'll be there so it's been another couple of hours and it's threatening to storm outside so let's get the goo out and try rinsing this off again and see how we're making out it's definitely turned quite dark it's looking pretty good not perfect it needs a little bit more time but from what I can see I would say this is going to be usable so I'm just going to pull the two bolts on the bottom here just clean that out flush it out and then we'll put the goo back in let it sit for another two hours I was wrong too about what that brass tube is in there I thought it was a tube leading up to the vent it's actually a tube running down to this bowl right here so when you insert the carburetor it actually goes through that brass tube right into here so this is sealed there's no way for the fuel to get into the bowl except through the filter and that also means whatever repair I do on adding a replacement tube it needs to fit through the tube and the tank into this bowl I was wondering how fuel got in here in the first place to then be able to advance to the bowl I couldn't quite figure it out because when looking down here originally I could not see inside the tank it was just solid and I thought that was just metal capping that off and now it just goes right through into the tank so yeah I guess the idea is the fuel comes from the tank through the filter into that hole in the bottom and then it exits out these little holes on the side which then allow it to go over to the Bowl so yeah the tank I would say is looking very very viable at this point anyway I am going to put the paint stripper back in for another two hours it doesn't seem to be damaging the metal it's only making things better from what I can tell okay so the Tank's been refilled we'll give that another couple hours and while waiting for that to marinate you know I think I'm going to make myself a cord I did manage to find the proper plug here this is a Hubble twist lock it is a 240 slash 120 volt plug similar to the more modern l14-30 I think the only difference is that this one does not have a ground wire it has two height wires and a neutral which I'm assuming the neutral is the larger one although I need to look into that because I don't know but what I want to do is just get a cord and adapt that to a standard l14-30 we're not going to have the ground wire but that shouldn't matter we only need the neutral in L1 and L2 and we can use a breakout cord and make sure that this thing makes power the next time we start it up I'm having trouble figuring out how to wire this properly into this generator the instructions that came with this don't really make any sense plus I don't know if this is wired exactly the way you would expect it to be so I thought I would just probe with the multimeter and figure out where neutral was based on the resistance and I'm getting some kind of erratic or unexpected reading so I'll show you that in a minute also I think I was wrong about the output of this machine I thought it was 3000 Watts but looking at it closer now it looks like it says 17.4 amps at 115 and about 11 amps at 230. so this is closer to a 2500 watt machine and the interesting thing is that usually leg 1 and leg two are balanced so if it's 17 amps at 115 volts then the amps at 2 30. in this case would be half that and it's not it's actually a little bit higher so that tells me most likely things are wound a little differently between leg 1 and leg two you know but still when measuring between leg 1 and leg two you should get the total resistance of each of the legs and that's not what I'm seeing let me show you all right hopefully you can see the multimeter I've got it kind of Jerry rigged so it's probably going to fall at some point anyway I started with the 120 output just to measure the resistance to see what leg one comes in at and in this case it's 60 5.5 ohms and after probing over here on these wires the different combinations I finally found that these two result in the same reading and just as a double check if I keep one lead there and one lead right there we get a direct connection so we know that those are essentially the same and if I check it to any of these others we don't get a direct connection we get resistance higher than 0.1.2 so these two are the same and then I did the same over here just to find the terminal on this outlet that has a direct Connection in this case it's that one right there and these others test High Resistance so that tells us that these two terminals are leg one on this connector now which one is neutral we don't know and usually what you would see is that you know let's just assume this one is neutral because it has a different color screw and we're at 65 ohms so if I go over here assuming this is leg two we should see 65 ohms and we do see something close and then if we connect between what I assume is leg one and leg two we should see roughly double that around 120. and yet we don't see that so let's assume that that was not neutral so let's say that this is neutral and we know we have 65 ohms between these two so we'll check over here and we get 68 so very similar reading so then I would expect you know if that's the neutral that if we go between these two again we would see roughly double that around 130. and we don't see that so yeah this is not set up the way I would expect on a more modern generator no surprise and the other interesting thing I noticed is that wind probing you know the value seemed a little off at times so then I rotated the engine which I'm going to do right now and as I rotate the engine I'm just rotating it and stopping the resistance values are changing so that actually tells me that this is very different from generators I normally work on because usually the wires on the output they're connected to the stator and it's the rotor in the middle that spins as an electromagnet creating power output but since we're getting changing resistance depending upon the position of the crankshaft that tells me actually the power output is coming out of the rotor the center of the machine that's spinning so it's coming out through the brushes and depending upon where we stop you know that's the resistance we get so I'm thinking I'm going to just pull the cover off here we'll take a look at the slip Rings probably measured directly on the slip rings and see if that gives us any insight as to what's going on together nope I'm gonna try the impact it's definitely not something that I would see on a modern generator we have three slip rings so most likely leg one and leg two one of them being the neutral and we also have something in here you know I'm guessing that this has to do with the excitation but I really don't know you know I have not worked on a generator like this anyway I can only see one of the brushes right here that's the spring that holds the brush in and I want to see or gain access to the others because I want to test from The Wire over to these receptacles and just see which slip ring goes to which terminal and yeah maybe that'll help me figure this one out actually while we're here let's just check this brush and see where it connects to over on the outlet so this is the middle slip ring we'll start with the 120 in this terminal we get High Resistance so it does not go there directly and this one's pretty low 0.1 ohms so the middle brush or the middle slip ring feeds that right there which I believe corresponded to that one which it does so let's pull the other cover and check the other slip rings it's been a while since these covers are off maybe never so I moved you back over on this side just so you can see where I'm probing on the outlet and I'll tell you which slip ring I have the other Probe on all right let's check this slip ring here the one on the right closest to the engine we already know where this one goes so let's try that we're looking for a low resistance in this case 31 ohms not quite low enough let's check over here and that is a direct connection so that slip ring is this other wire that's on L2 which I'm guessing has to be L2 we're just trying to figure out now which one of these on L1 is neutral so I'm going to move over to the outer slip ring and the outer one should be this one which it is so we know for sure now where each of these slip Rings go we know the main power output is coming over to the receptacles here so I still have the big question though is what is connected to what so now that we know the outer slip ring is definitely L1 really what we're trying to do now is probe from the outer slip ring to each of these others on the terminals trying to find actually the highest resistance connection which means that's the other end of L2 from L1 and that means the lower connection will be the neutral I hope so let's check from the outer slip ring to the middle and the inner and see what we get all right I've got one Probe on the outer slip ring terminal and the other probe in the on the middle terminal and yeah we're getting a pretty high resistance so you know I don't actually think this is a good test anyway because these terminals they are dirty and we're still testing through the slip ring so it's really no different than what we did out here so I might be overthinking this you know once the generator is running we can easily find out which one is the neutral so I'm going to wire these two up as leg one which we know as a fact and we know this wire goes to Lake two we just don't know which one of these wires is the neutral so if I wire it wrong on leg two we're actually going to see 240 instead of 120 and that's an easy test to do with the multimeter once it's running so we won't plug anything electrical in until we can validate that this is correct but I think for now that is probably the path of least resistance so before I put this cover back on I'm gonna clean these slip Rings a bit they actually don't look too bad and we'll just put the cover back on and move on so I just spent a bunch of time cleaning up these main slip Rings here and I thought I would double check the ohms and now we see something quite a bit different we were getting kind of in the 60 to 130 ohm range when testing leg 1 and leg two the readings were inconsistent based on how the brushes were contacting the slip rings and now that they're clean we see a much better reading you know on newer generators I usually test and get about 0.3 0.4 ohms so now testing leg 1 we're getting point four ohms 0.3.4 so that's actually in line with what I'd expect so now if I go back to here and test the same leg we should be at Point same reading point three point four there we go now on leg two if I'm measuring from the neutral to leg 2 and the neutral from leg one I would expect about the same reading and that's what we see about three or four ohms so then if I probe from leg one to leg two we should see double that and we do so that's the neutral that's leg one that's leg two foreign you know it's hard to make wiring look exciting so I'm not sure I'm gonna try but I've already done a lot of prep work here you know I've stripped back the outer insulation and the important thing here is to be careful you know after you strip this back look over these conductors carefully make sure you didn't Nick any of the wires and if you did just chop it off and start over which I did have to do on this one the other thing is you want to get the length right you want to clamp down on this wire here that has the outer insulation in place and then these wires need to be long enough to reach what you're trying to do without being too long you know in this case I think we're gonna be okay I guess we'll find out in a minute and again if you're if you're too short you need to strip stuff back a little more too long that's easy just cut off the extra and in this case we're going to have a neutral and two live wires now green is not a good color for a live wire usually you would do black and red or black and black at least in the US so I'm just going to get a Sharpie we'll color that black to give someone a clue that this isn't actually a ground you know that said this is just for testing I don't think anyone else is going to ever use this except me so it should be good but still will be safe rather than sorry I'm just gonna check the length first yeah that should be fine do two more like that I'm sure that's up to code and then just connect it taking care that these strands go all the way in you don't want strands poking out that could short with something else and the thing that really threw me on this connector too if you look at this standard l13-30 you know I can tell by looking at it because I've used these so much is that the one with this Bend here that's the ground opposite's neutral then we got leg one and leg two it doesn't matter where the live wires go whether it's here or here for leg one leg two or the other way around you just don't want to put it on a neutral and a ground and if you look at the terminals you know ground is green you go to the other side neutral is white and then the live wires are this copper color here and on the new connector what we found is that this one is the neutral and that is the gold color so you would think the other two which of the lives would be the same color but they're not we have this brass color versus a copper color which is leg one and leg two so yeah not as intuitive as this one and it's possible too that this generator is just so old that it's not following current standards for this type of plug anyway let's get the neutral on first it's just snugged down for now we'll tighten it up in a bit and most of these connectors have some sort of way to align these two pieces and in this one we have a little Notch right there which corresponds with that one right there so if you line those up they go right together that should be good and similar process over here so we got to loosen up this clamp get this on first you don't want to connect the other side and then realize you didn't do this because then you got to do it all over again and by doing this it's going to allow me to use standard plugs including my breakout cord which takes the neutral shares it between two 120 outlets and then one leg goes to one Outlet the other leg to the other so we get 120 volts on each leg if you want the full 240 then you would go between the legs because when one leg is positive 120 the other one's a negative and then that effect is you get 240. okay great and similar to the other one we have a tab right here and it should correspond to a tab right there let's do a quick reality check make sure I wired it properly or at least the way I intended so we'll start just by putting the multimeter into ohms we're going to measure from neutral on one to neutral on the other the connection should be a very low resistance connection this case 0.1.2 that's fine just check the other conductors make sure there's no stray connections and there's not so now we'll check one of the legs nice low resistance connection point one point two no straight connection anywhere else so we're good there and then we'll check the other leg 0.2.1 perfect yeah we're good it's the next day and I did pull the paint stripper out of there I put evaporest in overnight to finish the job so everything's rinsed out the nuts and bolts are out let's take a look at the final result here yeah that's pretty impressive that's looking the length of the tank we'll just pan it a bit so that's the bottom if you remember that from before it was a complete disaster and of course the top looks good let's just pan around a little more there's the brass tube going down actually into the bowl and yeah it's amazing I mean this tank you would never know what it looked like a few days ago so yeah I would say that is a pass we are done with the tank with the exception of the filter I've got a few ideas for that let me show you what I came up with so the original filter fit in like that you know it went down into the tank there was a bolt holding it down and the fuel would enter through the screen and then the filtered or the screen fuel would go through the bottom and exit on these holes on the side where then it could advance to the bowl so I was thinking initially of repairing this one finding a screen that would fit getting a new bolt and I already hit an obstacle because the bolt that I cut was kind of a specialty Fastener it was a very high thread count no hardware stores actually have it in stock you know I'm sure I could order it but then we still have the issue of finding kind of the perfect screen to fit on there so I'm going to save that part but I think I have another idea that might work just as well and initially I was thinking like a chainsaw filter you know if this could go in that hole in the bottom then we'd essentially have the same thing unfortunately it doesn't fit and I've tried a few different types and none of them quite are going to work out so then I got to thinking you know a generator like a generator you buy today in the store uses a filter that goes into the tank and this is just the standard Honda clone filter that you would see on something kind of like this so I took that filter off and it actually only came with this washer and was trying to find some way to get that to stay because that would essentially do the same as the original so what I came up with was actually a rubber bushing that replaces this o-ring and it's a nice snug fit so nothing's going to sneak by it if I bring that down to the bottom and it's also a nice tight fit on the outer diameter so assuming I can actually get it down in there I think it's going to be quite effective and then this filter it's a common very common filter you know so whoever ends up with this is going to have no issues in the future you know finding a replacement for it so yeah let's try to get that pushed in there see what that gives us I think that'll do it's a nice tight fit makes a good seal and it's going to filter the fuel a little crooked you know what it's not going to hurt a thing so we'll actually add the washer back and just snug that down foreign so the copper tube showed up that should in theory have fixed this carburetor you know that said I found a few problems the first thing is that the copper is so soft that most of the time when I pinch it it Kinks the line off you know this one actually I think is one of the few attempts that I believe is still passable meaning it allows air through it the more important problem is the fact that although this was advertised as an eighth of an inch outer diameter it's actually not it fits in there quite loose there's a lot of slop and when I double checked the dimension with the caliper you know we should be at 0.125 inches if this is an eighth of an inch and instead we're at point one one six five so yeah that's not gonna work so instead I was able to locate some brass tubes these are also advertised as an eighth of an inch and I would say they are because these actually don't fit in the hole but it's really really close like it actually holds the tube in place but I can't push it down to where it needs to go it needs to go about a quarter inch down so I took this one and sanded it just for a second well actually probably more like a minute and now it is going in a little bit further so I think with a little bit of work we can get it to fit about a quarter inch down and have it snug in the hole and I also tested making a Bend here you know I actually didn't think it was going to work out but it seems like it did it did not Kink you know this test Bend might actually be usable so we'll keep this kind of in our back pocket as a backup you know I do have this other tube which I'm going to show you the process that I went through to make that bend and hopefully get this installed we do need to cut it to length once the bend is there sand it and get it to fit in there properly but before we do that I am curious how this fuel pump works you know every fuel pump I've worked on uses a diaphragm which always goes bad especially with the ethanol fuel so I'm just going to use this cup of water we use the straw to simulate the big tube on the carburetor and we have the hook down on the bottom we'll just send some air through the brass tube and see if we get any water to come out of there it works pretty well it's like a percolator an old coffee pot so pretty ingenious design and I guess that explains why there's a cap on the big tube it's to keep it from forming a geyser and just shooting out the carburetor it directs it back down into the bowl so yeah pretty good design actually surprised this isn't used more often you know it's better than a gravity fed system with gravity fed systems rely on the needle and seat to function properly or else you end up flooding the engine spilling fuel on the floor or filling the crank case up with fuel in a design like this should theoretically last forever in this case it lasted 70 years and I think the only reason it failed is because someone left fuel in there for several decades and it eventually wore down the brass anyway let's get this one bent into shape see if we can't finish up this carb initially I bought this Bender to make the bend we need on the pipe and although it works fine the problem is it can't make a tight Bend like we need in this case so instead I'm going to use this bolt I chucked it into the drill turned it on and held the cutoff wheel there to make a channel similar to what this tool has so that'll help support the pipe as we make the bend but before we do that there's a few things we need to do here I want to actually sand this end and find out exactly what the diameter is that's needed to fit into this carburetor we'll need that measurement for later and then once we have that I'm going to heat up the pipe where we're going to make the bend you know this might be hardened so that will soften the metal we'll make the bend and if all works out we'll then sand the pipe to the same diameter that we found earlier and make the cut and with any luck get this installed properly [Music] foreign that's about a quarter of an inch so let's see what diameter that is let's double check what we have here and on the unsanded portion of the pipe it's 0.1255 so just a touch over and where we sanded which is actually on this end or exactly 0.125 or an eighth of an inch so that is good to know next I'm going to heat up the pipe on this end most likely this is hardened and by heating the pipe and letting it cool naturally it's going to make it a little bit more flexible so once it cools enough where I can hold it I will bend it around the bolt and hopefully we get something that's at least as good as the test if not better [Applause] it's still quite warm but I think it's cool enough to give this a try now I'm going to leave it a little long we'll cut off the extra when we're done foreign these look about the same I'm not sure if one is any better than the other you know this is the one I just made here so let's proceed with this one and I think the next move here is just to cut the pipe right about there to make that J and then find out where we need to cut it and before doing that we'll Chuck It Up Sand it down like we did over here so that hopefully once we make the cut it'll just slide together and we'll be in pretty good shape very carefully put this in here we don't want to crush the pipe should be good enough and I'm going to use a Dremel to cut this off it's not the best tool you might be better off using a pipe cutter of some sort like this which I could use over here but since this is folded I can't can't really do that so we'll just go careful it is going to make some Burr so we'll have to clean that up after and if I just take the tube and put it through the fuel return I can actually bring it all the way through the carb body put it in the large pipe right there and Mark roughly where I need to sand that pipe something like that I think we're there I'm just marking roughly again where it goes into the car body I'm going to add about a third of an inch to that Mark that's where I'm going to cut it so the big question is does it fit and it does it's a pretty snug fit goes right in the big tube so that should run as is and I guess the one thing I want to do before finalizing this is secure the pipe to the center one kind of like the old one was so I could put a Bend somewhere in here to get it closer and then we can add some solder and attach it you know what I'm thinking we actually could use just extra piece of pipe as a bridge we'll use some solder to firm it all up but before we do that let's just drop this in the tank and make sure this extra width isn't going to be an issue with the tube going down to the Bowl perfect all right the pipe removed all right that was a fail try this again except a little further up this time there was space was just a little too big and that tube fell through while trying to attach it to be honest I wasn't sure we were going to make it to this point I wasn't sure the carb was repairable I was fairly confident the tank was a total loss and of course without any parts available you know the options weren't looking too good yet you know here we are you know this carb I think is viable at this point and so is the tank so we'll just get this together starting with the main jet feels a little snug a little too snug but it is going in and we'll put the needle in turn this down lightly until it seats on the main jet you don't want to crank down on this because you can actually Bend and distort that tip on the needle so once it's lightly seated we're going to turn it back out so we're seated right now and we were roughly one and a quarter turns out which is right there we can fine tune it later and now we just have the primer circuit we have this spring with the needle reattached which goes right in there and just snug it up foreign ER itself now the primer I did not take it apart I don't know if it works I guess we'll find out in a minute you know to be honest though I'm not that concerned you know now that we know how this carb works we can just fill the bowl that's essentially the same thing as priming it all right let's try it out it's getting a little bit anxious but I do want to put this intake on as well since it has that splash guard right there foreign last but not least we need to mix up some two-stroke fuel so the machine calls for a ten to one mix of course that's not using modern oil it calls for 30 weight oil at a 10 to 1 ratio so for now I'm going to test with that ratio using SAE 30 oil you know later I can experiment maybe try a 25 to 1 or 32 to one you know but this machine has lasted 30 years and there's really no data on what modern oil can do as far as protection so we'll stick with the original recipe and to that end I'm not going to mix up a full gallon I'm going to mix up about a liter of fuel that's about a quarter of a gallon which should be more than enough for testing so the oil level I'll just bring it right below 100 fill the rest with fuel and throw it in the tank this Cap's pretty cool has the instructions for mixing the fuel and the oil and it also doubles as a measuring device so it says six of these full of oil with one tank of fuel mix it well and you're good to go so what do you think is it gonna run well I know it will because we tested it earlier I think the bigger question is will it stay running is that fuel pump repaired enough you know so that's what we're going to find out you know as far as the primer goes I did try it and we're not getting any fuel to the bowl so I'm just going to fill the bowl manually that should be enough to get it going and once it's running hopefully the pump takes over and the engine keeps running and assuming it does we can take a look at the output I've got the breakout cord connected I've got one light plugged into each leg these lights are turned off because this generator most definitely relies on residual magnetism there are no permanent magnets on the rotor and being that it hasn't been run in such a long time that could be an issue if all magnetism is lost we're not going to get any power output and starting it with a load on it will stress it to the point where it may not power up so those will stay off assuming we have output I'll turn them on see that we get output from both legs and we'll go from there everything foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I think I'll Stand Out Here for a few minutes the carbon monoxide detector it's not happy I've got to say I'm impressed this thing started right up and granted it was struggling at first you know I wasn't sure if it was a fuel pump issue but it ended up being a jetting issue so I opened up that needle about a half a turn to let more fuel into the engine at that point the engine speed it increased and stabilized so I turned my attention to the output side of things and according to the multimeter we were at 125 volts almost exactly 60 hertz and both lights turned down without issues so that confirms that leg one and leg two they are functioning all the wiring that was done here is correct and I was going to put a 1500 watt load on next and had to cut that short when the carbon monoxide detector started alerting me of a problem so that I guess is a good lesson don't run engines inside and if you do take the proper precautions only do it for a very short time have multiple carbon monoxide detectors have a fire extinguisher and never leave it unintended because you could burn your house down or if you're not paying attention you could poison yourself with carbon monoxide and by the time you realize what's going on it's too late so let's get this outside we'll get it started again and put it to work all right pretty much ready to go I've got two space heaters on standby they are 1500 watts each on high on low they're only 500 watts So the plan is just to start the engine we'll let it warm up a bit we'll double check the outputs we've got the kilowatt to measure the Hertz and the volts the amp probe to measure the total harmonic Distortion and we have the oscilloscope so we can actually see what the output looks like once it warms up we will put a load on the machine starting at 500 or maybe a thousand Watts we'll double check the outputs and if things look good we'll bump it up a little bit more I mean when new this could do 2500 watts can it do it now I don't know and honestly I don't think I'm going to test that because at this point at 70 years old this is more a showpiece a museum piece than something people are going to rely on for 2500 watts so I'm not overly concerned about the Max rated load anyway before getting it started I do want to get that air filter back installed you know most likely we'll have to adjust the jetting because the filter will richen up the mix a little bit and even before that the primer is something I might want to tackle because I was looking for parts for this you know I was checking looking everywhere for a parts diagram didn't find one instead I found a lot of Homelite chainsaw parts for vintage chainsaws and one of the parts looked like the part I needed the primer pump so I got it on eBay it was Dirt Cheap looks to be the right part and it is New Old Stock so maybe it'll work so let's try getting that installed first we'll test it out get the air box on and give this thing a start they look pretty similar if not identical so just moving the washer over to the new pump see if it threads in which it does yeah seems to fit the question is well let's send fuel up yep can you see it probably not let me get you in there closer it's nearly impossible to get this shot hopefully you can see I'm just going to pump it a few times yep yeah I think you can see that it's kind of squirting out the top and down the side so I would say the primer is fixed all right [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I've got to say I am impressed this machine it surprised me too for something so old I just expected the output to be dirty and I saw the complete opposite without a load we were at two percent harmonic Distortion sine wave looked great and under 2000 watt load things continue to look good the Distortion only went up to four percent sine wave looked great and then we had a problem the engine sounded like it was going to stall under the 2000 watt load so I took the load off and the engine continued to run bad but what I noticed is when I worked the primer things smoothed out quite a bit so I think something did get clogged up and I took a look in that tank and the fuel looks quite dirty so although I cleaned the tank pretty well there was still a bit of debris in the corners and I think the engine running just shaking things around may have broken off those last bits of debris and now the fuel system is clogged or at least partially clogged so let's get this back inside you know I wanted to drain the tank anyway for storage so we'll take a look at that fuel maybe give the tank a quick clean and call it done okay [Music] all right let's see how bad this is I'm just going to swish it around a bit I really just want to get any loose bits out that's amazing considering the tank was almost spotless by the time I was done cleaning it that fuel picked up a lot of sediment so most likely this is going to have to be done a few times well let's take a quick peek in there with the camera all right let's take a look in the tank we're looking down the length of the tank it looks pretty good rotate to the left see a little bit of debris there on the bottom and there's the fuel filter we installed and there's a bunch of debris right there behind that brass pipe so that was actually the pile of debris I was thinking about and it doesn't look like it broke up it is still there so what I'm thinking happened is that the debris came from here you know although the outside of this cleaned up really well the inside didn't you can see some of the debris right there surprisingly though when I rotate this a majority of it is now clean so that I would say is the source of the contamination and unfortunately this is going to have to be done a few times I think but we are a step closer anyway let's pull out the fuel filter and the nut from the bowl and just see if there's any chunks in there it looks like the repaired tube is holding up which is a good thing so I don't think we have any serious problems here yeah it doesn't look bad so I wonder if fuel just wasn't making it down to the Bowl bowl is empty and looks fairly clean and this bushing did blow out a little bit you can see there is some debris that was cut by the screen nothing obvious though although one thing I may have overlooked if you look at this filter the filter element doesn't start until right there so that's a good half inch of fuel on the bottom of the tank that'll never get drawn down into the bowl so it may have just been a case of not enough fuel in the tank and a bunch of junk well guys that's pretty much a wrap you know Against All Odds the 70 year old machine came back to life the generator made Power and not only that but the power output was clean and it could pull 2000 Watts without issue and I have no doubt we could have gotten to the rated 2500 watts if we had not run into fuel problems so yeah the tank that was really the hard part of getting this machine running it was a total mess of course the carb needed a little bit of help as well so I'd say we're about 95 percent of the way there needs to be cleaned a few more times I'm not going to torture you with that you've already seen that quite a bit over the last two hours so I hope this video helped someone thanks for watching foreign

Channel: James Condon

Views: 100,174

Keywords: 1950s, 2 Cycle, 2-Stroke, Alternator, Brushes, Carb Clean, Carburetor Rebuild, Compression Test, DEPSTECH, Evapo-Rust, Fixed, Fuel Pump, Fuel System, Generator, Hertz, Homelite, How To, How-To, Hubble Twist Lock, Insulation Test, L14-30, Load Test, Mineral Spirits, Old Fuel, Paint Stripper, Primer, Repair, Resistance Test, Small Engine, Spark Test, THD, Total Harmonic Distortion, Troubleshooting, Two Stroke, Ultrasonic Cleaner, Varnish, Vintage Homelite Generator, Vintage

Id: qA6ttBr5dVY

Length: 127min 45sec (7665 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023