Posted by Matt Wilson on Tuesday, August 20, 2002 at 2:06PM :
In Reply to: Polarity grounding question Help posted by George on Tuesday, August 20, 2002 at 7:59AM :
If you end up hooking up the battery opposite to the way it was hooked up before, you should polarize the system. If your old tractor has an ammeter, you can check to see if it's reading correctly by turning on some electrical component and watching to see if the ammeter needle points to the positive or negative side. If the ammeter seems to read opposite of what it should, then you will have to reverse the wires that connect to the ammeter, but be careful, as sometimes the nuts that hold the wires onto those old ammeters are stuck tight, and forcing the nuts off could twist the innards out of the gage, thereby ruining it. I don't think any other part of the system cares about being positive or negative ground.
If the battery was installed incorrectly when you found it, then running the engine may have fried the alternator or generator after a while.
In any case, you should probably polarize the system, regardless of how you hook it up, just to make sure it's moving those electrons correctly.
To polarize the system: On my regulator (and I think this applies to all regulators), I had to use a wire to make contact between the "Bat" terminal on the regulator to the "Arm" terminal on the regulator. Just touch them for about 1 second (the instructions say not to exceed 2 seconds). You will probably see a spark, but this is normal. It seems to me that the spark came from some place other than the regulator (perhaps the generator), but my charging system seems to be working fine.
If you polarize it and find that the charging system is still not working, check all your connections for correctness and corrosion. If it still doesn't work, then you might see about taking your generator and regulator to a Starter/Generator shop.
Good luck,
Matt