I have one of the Harley generators.  It's rated for 30A.  The magnets are mounted to the inside edge of a heavy gauge cake pan...heavy gauge being defined as something like 0.100".  This will bolt up to my flywheel, with the bottom of the pan against the flywheel.  It will spin at 6000RPM in cruise, which is right about where it would spin on a motorcycle.

The stator looks like an octopus that has been tied up with copper wire for some sort of medieval torture.  It's got two wires coming off of it that go directly to the regulator.  The stator will bolt directly to the back of my PSRU.  The wires don't spin, or move at all for that matter (relative to the mounting points).  No contacts.  No slip rings.

Voltage is a driving force.  Current is what is being driven.  The switching type regulator takes advantage of the fact that when you first apply a force, it takes a while for the driven stuff to start moving. We're talking microseconds, but there is a delay.  When the rotor spins to fast, you get to much of a driving force.  If left unchecked, the ship's systems will be overloaded.  Before this can happen, the regulator turns the generator off.  Without a circuit, no current flows and there's no load on the generator*...because it has nothing to push.  Before the current runs out (and the voltage drops as a result), the regulator switches the generator back on.  The regulator does it fast enough so that nobody notices the ripple of voltage going up and down.

I'm counting on this for my design of replacing the distributor with a small generator.  I'll set the regulator at 11V.  Ships power will be at least 12V.  Because it will always see the ship as being in overvoltage during normal operation, it won't actually switch on.  If I have a power outage from the main generator, the distributor mounted generator will kick in, and (through a diode arrangement) drive the primary electronic ignition.

That should create enough controversy to keep Ed going  8*)

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