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Mark, This is Bob, from the "NO WHINING" post. I'm not sure if you were referring to me as "jumping down someone's throat", but it was not my intention to belittle the original poster. I was being a bit off-the-wall, and my weird sense of humor does not carry through as well on a message board, as it does when I "rib" someone I know face-to-face. I have been known to do very precise, by-the-book repair work, but at the same time I've been around this equipment long enough to know each charging system with a mechanical "vibrating point" regulator has it's own personality. If you have a test bench, and the spec's for the voltage regulator, there are spring tension, armature air gap, and point settings in the regulator that can be "tweaked", but few people have the time, equipment, or know-how to do this anymore. The regulator you have is probably a generic replacement for the original, and is probably not quite as closely matched to the generator as the original was, and this may make the voltage regulation process a little rougher. Thirty or forty years ago, shops had catalogs listing the exact part number regulator to match the generator. There were dozens, if not hundreds of exact replacement regulators listed. Now, there are a handfull of regulators listed as generic replacements for all those listings. They generally work, but maybe not as well as the original. As you mention, when the battery is charged, and the engine is revved up, the mechanical regulator points open, and the generator goes to low charge, or no charge, until a little juice is drawn out of the battery, and then the contacts close, and the generator goes to full charge for a second or two. The voltage regulator points again open, and the cycle repeats. Ideally, this happens so rapidly the ammeter does not flicker, but in the real world on a vibrating old tractor, there is often noticable "flicker" of the ammeter as the regulator is cutting back the charging rate. The original poster mentioned changing the ammeter, and it is possible the new ammeter needle is not "damped", and accentuates the appearance of "flickering". Anyhow, I appologize for being offensive, but I stand by my original post that if the battery is being kept charged, there is nothing to worry about. This would be a different matter on a modern unit, with a bunch of electronic loads, such as computers, and DVD players, but the ole tractor probably isn't powering any of those! I guess, in my experience, I've seen more old equipment with a "flickering" ammeter, than with a very steady ammeter. We have all been around modern electronic stuff for so long, sometimes we forget that things have not always been so precise.
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