Club 80-90 Forums

At no point did i say that there wasn’t going to be localised galvanic corrosion due to normal corrosion that you’d see anywhere where dissimilar metals meet. “The electrolyte is present in the form of salt crystals” Salt crystals are not an electrolyte I think the point that we disagree on is how m...

Insulating the two metals with nylon washers and the both having their own earth is the ideal solution, but it’s not practical as the surfaces of the engine and gearbox are designed to be face to face. The vast majority of the galvanic corrosion will come from the time when you’ve got two metals wit...

I’m not denying that you’ll get some localised corrosion between dissimilar metals when they’re exposed to the atmosphere, but you’ll only get it in the area where the metals are joined and not all over the gearbox and salt crystals when they’re not in a solution aren’t an electrolyte. I’m also not ...

Where the metals are physically joined you'll get very localised galvanic corrosion, but any corrosion elsewhere on the gearbox isn't due to that and the corrosion where the metals meet has nothing to do with your earth connections.

Dave

Galvanic corrosion is only an issue when there are two dissimilar metals that are linked with an electrolyte. It's a big issue for ships with metal hulls as the sea water acts as an electrolyte and and you get electrons flowing from the metal higher up the galvanic series to the one lower down. The ...

How do you know the alternators sending charge? Which battery are you referring to? What starts to arc? Is it a petrol or a diesel? How are you starting the engine without the battery connected?

Dave

I think that the explanation for the 8.5A is simpler than you might expect although it’s impossible to be sure without seeing other readings. You’re not getting an extra 8.5A using the additional earth cable, rather the 10 Amps (i’ve guessed at this figure) that was originally flowing entirely throu...

@Timwhy I’m afraid that i agree with Martin that the red wire in the pictures isn’t really doing anything. All you’re doing is basically linking the engine earth and the gearbox earth which should be more than sufficiently earthed through contact without the need for an extra wire. Even with the wir...

@California Dreamin For petrol engines with unmodified wiring the feed from the alternator goes to the junction box on the left hand side of the forward end of the engine compartment. Anything that comes off the the metal post in that junction box is fed straight from the alternator and on my van th...

The problem with adjustable regulators is that they're not a solution to the real problem and all they do is mask the symptoms. They could also potentially cause problems with damaging your engine electrics due to overvoltage. Your current regulator will regulate the voltage at around 14.4V at the o...

You would not need a 12 Volt regulator to protect anything on the vehicle from 14.4 Volts. Everything on our vans is just fine at 14.4 Volts (even car stereos and alarms etc are fine up to 16 Volts) I was thinking of running a cable from the alternator regulators sense wire all the way to the start...

My inital thought was to do some sort of variable interval based on the previous reading of the RPM, or try to measure the time between the first two spikes and set the timing interval based on that, but when you think about what's actually going on it's just a roudabout way of trying to collect a m...

Hi, Next year i've got all sorts of plans to add a more modern control and feedback system to my van using lots of Arduinos dedicated to various functions (heating control, eber control, engine readouts, etc) and linking them all usings their built in I2C bus. Got a few sketches on the go already bu...

Hi, It’s certainly an interesting alternative for charging a leisure battery, but it’s only really suited for situations where you don’t let your leisure battery get too low. As the charger is limited to supplying 10 amps then it’ll take much longer to get an empty battery to complete the bulk charg...

I stand corrected about the diaphragm pump. I assumed that's what it was as they're much simpler and harder to gum up with crud but they're not as precise when it comes to delivering a set amount of fuel. The needle type pump that they're actually using is pretty easy to gum up so it's possible that...