Stage 1: Tweaking

By "tweak", what I really mean is flail around trying random crap I find on the Intarwebz till something works.  The resistance problems I've got are so far pretty significant.  By resistance, I don't mean electrical resistance measured in Ohms (though I've been learning about those too), but rather how hard it is to turn the alternator when the field is powered up.  To which the answer is very.  I actually slightly strained a hamstring trying to crank it over once the field juices up and starts making power.

A friend of mine from college suggested that I may not have a functioning diode in the alternator, which made sense to me, but I was able to disprove that using the diode test mode in my multimeter.  My next idea was that the load being drawn by the battery is very high due to the battery being mostly discharged.  The voltage in my Battery is so low that it's was basically flat.  Connecting it to my car's battery in parallel to charge it up got me up to around 75% charge.  The load is still too great to sustain pedaling.  This is a major problem since part of this idea is that I would be able to at least partially discharge the battery and recharge it.  If this theory is correct, I would only be able to draw as much as I could put out instantaneously, since recharging the battery grinds me to a halt.  So I need a way to limit the load.

I found some kids at MIT that tried to use an Alt driven by bike wheel deriving the cranking power from a Ghatta, which is a type of water driven millstone in Nepal.  They found they needed to modify the field current with resistors in parallel to bring the current to the Alt field down.  That didn't seem to do anything useful with the resistors I tried.  These guys also made me realize I'd been driving my alternator backwards...  I fixed that, and still no love (and I hope that didn't mess any of the internals up).  Then I found some Brits that say you put the resistors on the Alt output line to bring down the load, though I have to admit, I don't see how that would do it at all.  But that's my next try.  Also, I will attempt to further charge my battery up to full to see if a full battery lightens the load.