Sounds like you are getting overly complicated. Why bother taking the belt off? .Murphy's law says if you have an engine failure it wil lbe the one with the disconnected belt.
If you have a properly installed alternator and your system is balanced, it should run for several years with liteel attention needed. But if you have installed an oversize alternator and still drive the water pump with the same belt; of course you wil lhave trouble. I always recommend that you leave the OEM alternator in place for charging the start battery independently. The new high output alternator is wired seperately to your house bank. A double shive pulley is made up that bolts to the front crankshaft pulley. In most cases thes pulleys are already drilled and tapped for a PTO. Yanmar and Kubota blocks are universal utlity ingines used in thousands of applications. They are intended for power take of at both ends of the crank shaft. sometimes you can even buy th eright pulley from an industrial engine supplier. It isn't rocket science. You can (unload) disable any alternator with an external regulator simply by disconnecting the field circuit. That immediately reduces the loading on belt and to a lesser extent the bearings. Sealed bearings in the alterantor wil last a long time. Many years for most boat applications.If you are not using the water pump belt to also drive the alternator, yo udon't have any problems to deal with. regards Arild -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Philip R. McGovern Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 12:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Liveaboard] Fanbelt dust Arild: Thanks for the good advice. I should have thought of checking Balmar's website myself. Duh!!! As soon as I get back to the boat, I'll find out what sort of regulator I have and go from there. Since we nearly always run both engines, it also occurred to me to just disconnect one of the alternators by just taking it off the belt (and replacing the belt with one having a smaller diameter, of course). To even out the wear on the alternators, I could alternate this setup from one engine to the other every year or so. Any thoughts? Thanks again. Phil McGovern s/v Sunshine On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Arild Jensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: -----Original Message----- From: Philip R. McGovern How did you reduce the amp output of your Balmar? Is it a setting on the alternator itself or something else? I am running two Balmar 100 amp alternators and I hardly ever need all of their output. I'd rather save the fuel (or increase the RPM;s) if there's an easy way to back them off a little. REPLY Its done with the amp manager adjustment on the regulator. The exact process is described in the documantation included with the regulator. If yo uhave lost o rmisplaced the installation / instruction manual its availabel for download from www.balmar.net Arild _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
_______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
