I keep hoping GM or somebody would make a mini-van with the Volt drive train, or maybe a full size van.  This just seems like a good way to go for what my driving needs are, I could do at least half my driving without needing to start the engine.

Also, the same size wire can carry more or less current depending how many strands it has.  I've noticed that cheaper wire has fewer but larger strands for the same gauge.  And some brands of wire work harden and break much more easily than others.  It may be that some wire is less pure copper than other brands.  Good info about the PWM controllers.

Good question Casey.  The way I understand it is that energy flows downhill such as from hot to cold to start with.  They say that heat is motion so heat is pumped into water until the molecules are moving very fast and pushing hard on the inside of the container it's in like the boiler and pipes.  There are formulas that express the direct relationship between pressure and temperature, all that pesky detail stuff called laws of physics.  A power plant has a mostly closed loop where the high temp and pressure steam pushes on the turbine blades doing work but losing a bit of heat and pressure as it passes through each stage of the turbine.  After many stages of pushing on the blades the water molecules have slowed and cooled down to where the pressure is reduced and the steam is in danger of condensing back into liquid water that would be rough on the blades if it struck them.  A drop of water turned to steam occupies something crazy like 1700 times the volume of space so it's kind of hard to pump steam back uphill so to speak to the boiler especially when it wants to turn back to water as the temperature and pressure is lost.  Plus I think that if you compress steam you can turn it back to water according to the pressures and temps.  Somebody made up these crazy rules for how matter behaves in this dimension but it's very handy that the rules have a consistency to them most of the time so we can get predictable results.  I think that it's just a matter of being able to handle the water molecules in an efficient enough manner as they go around the loop, pumping a little volume of water gets you a large volume of steam after you add heat.  The massive amount of energy involved with changing the state of water from liquid to steam and back again is a kink in this process and I suspect that is why you are asking the question.  If you could skip the phase change steps at each end and just shove the steam right back into the boiler and reheat it I'd think it would be more efficient.  But the main thing that drives the turbine is the pressure difference between inlet and outlet and condensing the steam greatly reduces the pressure on the low pressure side of the loop.  Seems like maybe you could use the steam leaving the turbine to boil Freon or ammonia and run some of the plant machinery off a smaller steam engine system loop rather than dumping the heat from condensation, but maybe not worth it in the overall energy flow.  To me it seems that if you want 1000 Megawatts out of a fission power plant you have to make 3000 Megawatts of heat.  It would be nice to use all the heat to do something useful although heating the night air could be considered useful in some circumstances.  I used to live 30 miles downwind from a Nuke plant and on some cold nights I could feel a warm fog coming from the power plant.  The homes that heated with heat pumps were pretty efficient compared to homes on the upwind side of the valley!  The power company relocated some vent lines from the cooling towers to a purpose built tower so they could point at the cooling towers and truthfully say that no radiation was coming out of those towers.  That was about the time that I was starting to think that Nuke plants were not the best way to make electricity.  The big fusion reactor in the sky seems to be very reliable and somewhat safe... so far. 

Thanks for all you do to keep us going!

Fantastic job on everything!  Thanks for sharing!  I'd like to convert a Changfa 175A to propane and now you've got me thinking I might have trouble getting the charge to light off consistently because I was going to replace the injector with a sparkplug at the end of a chamber in the injector hole.  It might be a bigger challenge than I was figuring between the spark and fuel mixture problems.  The 175A is just too loud as a diesel for me to use and there are no small water cooled engines that I know of in the USA.  I dream of a small CHP system for a travel trailer!   Leland

I wish SOM flywheels were easy to come by because they would look better and add a lot more mass than what I did.  But it's fun for me to re-purpose car parts for other uses.  I like to hit the U-Pull junk yard when they have sale days because I always need something anyway.  These brake drums were off the front of about a '70 Dodge van and not too common because most people popped the few extra bucks for disc brakes.  The front drums are a better shape than disc brake rotors due to the mass at the outer edge.  Also seemed better than a few engine flywheels I looked at for the same reason although a couple of flywheels might be enough mass if you chose well.  I'd guess the drums weigh about 25 pounds each and just one seemed to cure the flicker as I also have a real heavy pulley/flywheel on the generator shaft.  The area where the outer wheel bearing sat was a good size to turn a taper to fit an inexpensive taper lock bushing from Surplus Center.  The 2" ID bushings are pretty cheap from several online bearing supply houses also but I don't remember what they cost.  Brake drums or rotors for the rear axle would have a hole in the center that would be too big for a bushing.  At some point I will adapt an automotive flywheel to bolt to the lug studs so I can use an auto starter on the ring gear instead of the belt drive thing I have now.  I hurt my spine about the time I started playing with this CHP stuff even though I've been wanting to do it since I was about 10 years old.  I haven't been able to finish the install; or a lot of other projects.  I had fusion surgery and my spine has never been right since so I don't get much done in a day, or a year.  I've been wanting to make a video to show how much my engine hopped before I added weights to the flywheels, haven't got to that yet in almost 10 years, maybe I can post a photo a little quicker.  At the rate I get things done it could take a week or two until I can get to it.

If I was troubleshooting this at this point, I'd check the field current while the engine is running and also the output voltage, as well as the field voltage.  A look at those 3 things should point to the failure point.  Along with repeated ohm meter readings of all the windings and checking for shorts to ground it should become obvious what is wrong.  Every once in a while I've found bizarre things that I'd never suspect though  !  One time I scraped the lighting coil on a Suzuki 250 using the wrong puller on the flywheel and then the engine had a miss when the headlight was on.  Two of the outer windings were a little flattened but the coil measured perfedt electrically.  Replaced the coil and spark miss was gone so I'm guessing that the shape of the magnetic field was somehow altered or weakened by the shape of the wire being changed.  It didn't seem like the winding was shorted or anything, just flattened from round a little.     Truth is stranger than fiction...                                    Leland

Thanks for the thread Gary.  I have wondered if the growl in my 7.5 was caused by a slightly loose winding and you have seemed to confirm my suspicion.  I will pull mine apart before I run it much more.  It just doesn't seem right that it would make this noise just from the magnetic flux, something with mass is moving slightly  .