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Hi all, I had a bit of a mishap with my regulator today. I was driving along and smelled smoke, didn't think much of it because I had my window open, that was until I noticed it coming out from under the dash! I pulled over and had a look under the dash but couldn't see anything wrong, so I lifted the back seat to disconnect the battery and saw the regulator smoking furiously. I disconnected the battery and took the relay off and found the resistor on the bottom was black. I was on my way to visit a client, and was nearly late, so remembering Jim's story about how he ran on battery power for quite a while, I decided to disconnect the generator. When I popped the engine lid, the generator was quite hot (I nearly burnt my hand when I lent on it). I took the pulley off, and just left the B+ wires connected on the regulator. So off I went, in the pouring rain without headlights or wipers, but I got there fine. There is a VW mechanic on my way home, so I stopped in there, only to find they had closed early! ;-) I went to the nearest auto electrician to see if they had a regulator. Of course they didn't but offered to do some tests for me which was good. I started to put the pulley back on so he could do the tests, when he noticed that the D+ wire had come off the generator terminal and was shorting on the body of the generator. I hadn't noticed that when I pulled over earlier, I just assumed having the lights, fan and wipers going all at once got too much for it. He put a new connector on there, and did some voltage tests and found that it was going up to nearly 16 volts at about 3500 rpm. He thought that the generator was fine, but I would definitely need a new regulator. He also told me when I started it up after connecting the generator that it repolarised itself?? I am not sure how he could tell that- he was looking at the generator light, it went out like normal as far as I could tell. Later tonight I rung up a friend from the VW club and asked if he had a spare regulator. He gave me one off a 1302 Super beetle. I got home (still running on batteries) and put the regulator in. The car started up all right, the generator light went out as normal, so I hooked up the multimeter to check on the voltage. When I revved the engine initially, up to about 2500 rpm, the voltage rose to 14.48 volts then steadied off there so I thought I was ok. I let it idle down, and it went to about 12.98 volts. Then the regulator started flicking on and off, and the interior light was flicking bright and dim. The multimeter was all over the show, from about 12.98 up to 15, and this was at idle. I revved it again to about 2500 again, but the voltage only went up to 13.8 or so, and the regulator kept flicking on and off in time with the engine, and the generator light was also flickering. I left that, and measured the old regulator and this is what I came up with: The resistor measures 3.3 Ohms, the 'large' relay (thick wire) measures about 0.2 Ohms (near enough to 0 resistance) and the 'small' relay (thin wire) measures 58 Ohms. Does this sound about right? The only thing that is actually burnt is the plastic that covers the base (between the resistor and metal base). I expected that the resistor would be open circuit, but all of the wires look fine. I have to use my car tomorrow morning for work, so I was wondering if anyone has any helpful suggestions to get it working again. If not how long will my battery last without a charge? Ben Doughney '75 1200L '63 1200 - Ringo '71 1600TL http://members.tripod.com/~superkafer/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- List info at http://www.vwtype3.org/list | mailto:gregm@vwtype3.org