Hello all,
Recently I've experienced 3 brand new "Lucas" regulators for BJ8's that would
not work. I cleaned the contacts and installed as per the usual, ensuring the
generator and regulator were correctly polarized. Start the engine and the
ignition light simply wouldn't go out. Generator was putting out a good
charge.
Long story short I took them to a local fellow who came highly recommended by
an old Scottish mechanic whose opinion I highly respect. I was asked to bring
along the generator.
This fellow has all the test equipment to set up the generator on a drive
fixture, hook leads up to the regulator and take all the appropriate readings.
All 3 regulators at first were doing nothing, as I had found.
More thorough point contact cleaning with a fine points file, and quite a bit
of point cam adjustments and all 3 were able to be adjusted accurately and
could be watched as variable loads were applied.
An interesting observation: all 3 new units have a rubbery cloth insulation
that coats the resistor wires on the back side of the regulator that did a
slight initial heating up and burning off of some of the rubber with a slight
wisp of smoke evident. Then they settled in after a further adjustment to work
fine. I was concerned about this but was assured this is quite normal when
first put to use. Originals do not have this rubber insulation but have a
woven insulation that heats up but doesn't cause smoke while curing.
My point to all this is simply to note how far off some of these new
regulators can be right out of the box.
Anybody else have similar experiences?
Rich Chrysler
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