[AT] Charging batteries

[Indiana Robinson]

As someone who grew up during the late 1940''s and early 1950's and as  kid
I was watching life very closely and asking a million questions. My father
had many failings and we didn't always get along well but I have to  give
him credit for teaching me many skills and always being ready to answer
questions and trying to teach me anything he was able to.
The 1946 Allis Chalmers C that I own that was bought new by an extremely
close family friend of three generations has almost since new been poor at
keeping the battery charged. It was almost allways used for a lot of short
running jobs with a lot of starts but short run times. When charging it
usually only threw a couple of amps and at times it just wasn't in the mood
to charge at all. His son had a "lot" of electrical training while in the
army during WW-II and he cursed it constantly.
Now this part may be new for a lot of the younger folks but in about the
first half of the last century reasonably priced home battery chargers were
mostly just not there. For many years it was very common for folks to
remove the battery from their car or tractor and take it to a service
station and pay to have it charged. I can well recall going into service
stations in the early 1950's and seeing shelves sitting full of batteries
being charged.
My father had a very good friend in the late 1930's who had a service
station in a small community about 8 miles from here. When war was declared
after Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the country went into war
production in early 1942 his friend shut down the service station and both
of them started working 12 hour shifts 7 days a week at Allison's in Indy.
I don't know what his friend did but my father was testing aircraft
engines. Since he was making very good money he bought a lot of the tools
and equipment out of the service station from his friend. One of those
items was a large battery charger capable of charging 12 batteries at a
time.
On another tractor note, that was the same time that he bought his new 1941
9N and a batch of farm equipment.
Back to the Allis C, the family friend kept the C in a tiny shed and his
son ran an electric line out to it. Then he built a 6 volt charger from a
junk yard auto generator, a matching voltage regulator and a smallish
electric motor to drive the generator. I recall being really impressed as a
kid the first time I saw it running. Then again in those days I was
impressed by about anything with moving parts that made noise.  :-)
That Allis still has major rounds of depression when It doesn't want to
charge... We replaced the generator with a rebuilt one from TSC and
replaced the cut-out with a conversion kit that used a conventional voltage
regulator and did away with the original light / charge rate switch and all
wiring replaced. I can assure you that I have checked the grounds, checked
the grounds, checked the grounds until I am blue in the face but it still
lacks reliability. I think that I will break with my normal approach and
convert it to 12 volts and a smallish alternator. I'll just keep all of the
original stuff in a box on a shelf up in the loft. Over the years I have
usually just used the crank to start it if it was weak but the family
friend was elderly, very slightly built and in poor health and that tractor
does crank kind if hard. He just couldn't crank start it.


.


-- 
-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.antique-tractor.com/pipermail/at-antique-tractor.com/attachments/20190311/668f73be/attachment.html>