Got some time to tidy up some of my installation over the xmas break, built a base and mounted the new generator permanently to the engine.
The generator I thought was a reasonable price, seems to be well made, lots of iron with copper coils, not aluminium, and good sized sealed ball bearings....
Interestingly it has a digital readout that gives voltage, frequency, run time and winding temperature, a nice touch but a bit of a gimmick really.
The bucket contains cooling oil for the submerged battery charging transformer. This is a rewound 180 amp welding transformer with a center tapped secondary winding and two hefty diodes. This will do until I find a better container. Seemed sensible to use this charging method rather than another alternator and vee belt combo.
The generator is branded Cenfor and made in China, its brushed with a fairly robust looking AVR, large cooling fan at the front, real copper windings and arrived complete with a dual C section front pulley at 3.5 inches. After a few hundred hours with a 75 percent load it appears to be reliable and have had no issues, so for the money at $650nz, I can recommend these as being ok and appearing to be good value. The 240 volt output has a 20 amp AC circuit breaker/overload, as does the 12 volt DC output terminals.... this I have used to power the electric radiator fan for the engine.
One interesting feature, the alternator appears to use an integral permag 12 volt alternator to supply the main exciter current, the cogging is evident when spinning it by hand. This explains the clean and sudden startup when started under load, good for NOT accidentally burning out capacitor start motors as can happen with a "soft" start, or usual slow buildup.