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Making progress

To: <spitfires@Autox.Team.Net>
Subject: Making progress
From: "Tustin Borg" <Tustin@xmission.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 19:55:11 -0600
Hello everyone.  Hey, thanks for all the advice on the electrical problems -
especially to those of you nuts who just happened to be up to reply almost
immediately at 2:30, 3 and even 4 in the morning!  LBC owners are definitely
a rare breed and I think many of us are alike in many ways...crazy.

Anyway, I'm a little embarrassed to have posted.  I just don't understand
electricity well enough.  Yeah, I was getting 12V from the battery (until I
put a load on it), but apparently not enough amps.  Switched batteries and
she fired right up!  By the way, I've lost the receipt for that battery and
it's less than a year old and has about 100 miles on it - probably 10
starts - all last November.  I charged it about a month ago and right
afterwards it worked fine, but now nothing. But when I put it on a trickle
charger, it only takes 2 amps.  Any takes on why that might be?

I think I may have just answered that question myself when asking it - at
least in part.  Seems to me, when you put a dead battery on a charger, it
initially only takes a few amps, then builds up, then back down.  Question
then is why is it dead?  It was charged only a month ago, fired the car up
once or twice less than 2 weeks ago, and other than that has been
disconnected.

Actually, that isn't even the meat of this message.  I've got a new problem.
(Big surprise, eh?!)  Before I ran out of money, time and sunny weather at
the end of last year, I replaced my dead generator with a new one because my
charge light on my dash was staying on.  Put the new one in and the light
stayed on.  I went to a local LBC "tech session" and it was explained to me
that I needed to replace the voltage regulator as well, then needed to
polarize the system.  My buddy was pretty sure he knew how to do the
polarization thing and when we took the spit to his house to do this clutch
job, we put on a new regulator and polarized it.  Or so we thought.  But now
that she's running, the charge light is still on.  At this point, my friend
admitted that he might be mistaken on how to polarize.  But still, I'm not
sure that's the problem.  The generator at idle puts out about .2V and when
the engine is raced it raises to about .7V.  Is my new generator bad?  I
know I should be seeing about 13V or 14V.  But back to the polarizing
thing...how do I do that?  My notes from that tech session say to touch
together the second "A" from the left on the voltage regulator (whatever
that means) with the "F." (I guess the leads are lettered.) Do I do this
while the car is running, or off?  How do I know if it worked?

-Tustin
'67 Spit (FD2045L) - Who enjoyed her first jaunt today since last November!



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