Double header, Working on Harley Fan generators this week.

Had a customer drop off a Model51 Fan genny for repairs, and had to do some minor surgery to get ‘er fixed.

The “spider” in the above picture is a piece that bolts on the end of the fan generator. The 3 screws that hold the large aluminum “squirrel” cage fan enclosure in place screw into the 3 lugs on this spider. These lugs frequently break off, and then the housing is just basically held in place by friction.

Well, these lugs were broken off and I reattached them, as you can see in the above picture. I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with a solution, time will tell if it’s going to hold up.

First I temporarily glued the broken lugs in place to keep them located while machining. Then I countersunk and drilled each broken lug so that I could press in 2 roll pins to hold them permanently.

As you can see, you can barely see where the crack was. 2 of the 3 lugs had broken off.

After pinning the lugs in place, I made a fixture to chuck the spider in the lathe so I could turn down the outer dimension of the lugs so that they would be the same overall diameter as a known good NOS spider I keep for reference. This allowed the end cover to just slide over the spider and bolt in place.

Also, While working on this model 51, I was also refurbishing a Model 32E2R I have in stock and upgrading it to 12 volts, an operation I perform by installing model 65A 12 volt fields. Had a devil of a time getting the fields to fit on the pole shoes. Finally looking through my spares, I found a different pair of pole shoes that worked just fine. That’s when I made the discovery that the pole shoes fitted to the 32E2R, 49R, and 51R are different that those pole shoes used in the 58R.

Here are some pole shoes from my collection. Left to right; repop pole shoe from Brand CC generator, stock HD 65A pole shoe, 58R pole shoe, 32E2R pole shoe, 32E pole shoe. As you can see, the 32E2R, 49R, 51R pole shoe is wider where the field coil fits. The faint red lines show the approximate width of a 65A field coil.

See how nicely the 65A field coil fits on the 58R pole shoe.

So, the obvious solution to my problem was to use the smaller sized pole shoe.

I found it interesting that the aftermarket pole shoe was so much smaller than the original equipment ones. If I ever get my gauss meter built, I may have to check out just how effective the smaller sized shoe works!

Also, one last generator note, I discovered that some aftermarket field coils I recently picked up would not tighten down enough so that an armature would clear the pole shoes. finally decided that the windings were oversize. Solution, rewind the insulating wrapping!

And here are the finished wrappings. The tape is some sort of medical tape, found at the dollar store, it’s sticky, but not too sticky. I had to rewind the tape from it’s original spool to a smaller one that would fit inside the center hole in the fields.

I used a 1/4” drive 3/8” socket to wind the tape on. Being lazy, I grabbed a power tool to do the work for me :-)