MTFCA Forum

Firsts off, this is NOT an ad for parts for sale. Like everyone else I've been holed up inside all winter, and I've been busy. Some folks work on their cars, I've been busy making Model T parts and I'm finally starting to see the fruits of the literally hundreds of hours I've put into engineering and fabricating EVERYTHING inside both Model T starters & generators, one painstaking part at a time. I just got samples of the brush plates in the mail today and they look fantastic!

One way or another I'm going to get the cost of a new starter or generator to drop like a rock. Wilson field coils are now over $100. Its crazy. I'm putting an end to the craziness. My goal is to bring the cost of both starters and generators with ALL NEW COMPONENTS to under $300.

Also, a lot of these components are just not salvageable from cores any longer, they're just plain worn out.

I'm now making both starter & gen field coils, brushes, springs, post bolts, brush holders, brush plates, everything. Starter Field coils will have the copper (not brass) post silver soldered & pre-installed. Initial testing by myself and others shows them to be equivalent and in some ways vastly superior to the Wilson coils we're currently stuck with using. If you can even find one.
I'm also reproducing both brush plates and adjustment rings - they came out great. I also had them copper plated for superior conductivity. You gotta get as much of that energy from the battery to the starter as possible.
Zinc cast brush holders w/ reinforced screw receiver & pre tapped & drilled posts I'm also putting kits together that contain everything needed to do full rebuilds Did you know that starter springs have twice the force as the generator spring? 12 Newtons vs 6 Newtons. With any luck, I'll have all this stuff done by early May, coming to a vendor near you.
I'm working on Generator armatures next - it's almost $200 to get them rewound (it used to be $45 not that long ago). Mine will be brand new and be less than half that.

This hobby needs to remain affordable. So, I'm doing my part!

Jeff

Thank you for helping out the T hobby!

Nice work!

Thank you for all of the work you have put in to all of these parts! It gives me hope, being younger than most, that there will be NEW QUALITY parts for sale that don't cost an arm and a leg in the future.
Thank you!

1925 Touring wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 16, 2025 3:02 am

that there will be new, QUALITY parts for sale that don't cost an arm and a leg in the future.

Exactly. The challenge is quality and achieving tight tolerances. I reject anything that isn't at least as good as the original part. Balancing quality and cost is tricky. I out right reject marginal parts and have had to select different manufacturing vendors at times. It's extremely time consuming, but worth the investment in the end.

Good thing I'm now "retired".

Jeff,
that's all very impressive.
Well done indeed.

In my search for a good spare starter I found that the majority of them had good field coils etc, but the armatures were shorting to ground.
It seemed that rewinding an armature was going to be very expensive indeed.
Is the world short of good armatures?
Can they be restored at reasonable cost?

Thanks

Chris Barker wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 16, 2025 8:44 am

In my search for a good spare starter I found that the majority of them had good field coils etc, but the armatures were shorting to ground.
It seemed that rewinding an armature was going to be very expensive indeed.
Is the world short of good armatures?
Can they be restored at reasonable cost?

Thanks

I find that more than 9/10 starter armatures are perfectly useable. But, there are several problems here with gen armatures. In my experience, about 3-4 out of 10 old generator armatures are not savable. At least I would not use them for a rebuild. Sure you might be able to coax out another year or so of use, but it's not worth the hassle. They're either shorted with no output, shorted with reduced output or mechanically damaged in some way. The ancient lacquer insulating coating on the coil windings is just not durable. So, they go in a box as cores. Newly rewound units are upwards of $175 but only if you buy 10 at a time. Then there's both the cost of shipping the cores plus the cost of shipping the new ones, and these units are heavy. By the time it's done, you're into a rewound unit for more than $225.

I can make a brand new generator armature that is a replica of the original for a fraction of that, so that's what I'm going to do. It may take me a few months and a ton of testing and adjusting, but it's the right thing to do, and everyone benefits.

Jeff

Thanks so much Jeff for these much needed parts.
This will make it easier for the purist to stay with generators.
They (generators) have gotten ridiculously expensive to rebuild.
I’m not and never have been a fan of modern accessories for a T.
If you need all the new stuff, buy a Pinto.
Thanks again Jeff!

Brent Mize wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 18, 2025 6:45 am

They (generators) have gotten ridiculously expensive to rebuild.
I’m not and never have been a fan of modern accessories for a T.
If you need all the new stuff, buy a Pinto.

Well said. Good thing I'm retired. I've never worked so hard
Brent, your son , Chris, is doing a great job on rebuilding these. I may soon need to just supply parts. I put a starter together yesterday and my hands literally ache. Damn things weigh a ton. Time for the young guys to step in!