A ? for the Electrical Smarty Pants on this forum.

[kyle4501]

Your starter will run backwards and the 2 cycle WILL run backwards.  That isn't ok with the engine and the thing will have only one slow forward gear and 4 reverse gears but be rather quick backwards down the road.

John

That's an urban legend.

First off, the starter doesn't care about polarity as Sean pointed out.
Secondly;
The DD won't run backwards, not for long anyway. The blower will be running backwards as will the fuel pump & oil pump. Kinda hard for it to run with no air, fuel or oil.

[uncle ned]

   


    I have ran across many old british cars that people put batteries in wrong. The only thing that doesn't work is the tach.

uncle ned

[rcbishop]

Guess we know now who the "Smarty Pants" are....
RCB

[gus]

I'm still not sure if he has an alternator or generator. So, if it is a gen flash the field and any  external mechanical regulator together. I don't know about carbon pile or solid state regulators.

If it is an alternator no flash the field!!

The only gages affected are amp or voltmeters and all you need do is revrse the leads to the gages. The original generator Charging Gage is another story, I don't know what that thing does and from what I can tell it doesn't matter much unless you have the absolutely stock original setup. My 4104 is converted to an alternator and the charging gage goes nuts once in a while with no visible effect on anything!

The numerous selinium rectifiers (diodes) in my original 4104 electrical system have been bypassed and rewired so much I have no idea what they do anymore but since things work pretty well I don't much care.

Changing from pos to negative ground systems is normally no big deal. I've done it on numerous British cars and old farm tractors.

[zubzub]

It's a generator, and the regulator looks original, I have seen an aftermarket reg on a 4104, but this one looks just like the book.  From what I've read in this thread looks like all I need to do is flash the field and off I go.  Pretty sure it was charging backwards (decharging) before so maybe I already kind of knew it was backwards but need a little push to be sure.  Thanks to everyone for your help, hopefully this will be my last electronics post...as one of the reasons I like the 4104 is the simplicity of the electrics.  Could be simpler though and will be once I'm done with it.