Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 First HD Rectifier Failure?

Upon returning from a fabulous 4 days around Wales with some of the other Grindelwald-Incompatibles from the UK, it seems my rebuilt car has decided it was time to eat its Harley Regulator (fortunately at home rather that on Snowdon in the rain....). Whilst on a short drive to confirm that I had cured the most dreadful handling issues (more on that in a future thread), I noticed that familiar acrid smell you only get from hot/burning electrical components and it was really strong. Voltage dropped to 12.6v and something was clearly wrong. All wiring to the HD unit (the usual replacement part no. 74540-1) was present and correct and the big 4-pin plug was correctly assembled. The stench from the regulator when I got back to the garage was horrible so I waited for the engine to cool and set about fitting the replacement HD unit I'd been carrying around with me for about 4 years. Fired the car upo and we're back to 14.1v again, so that was a relatively easy fix.

Has anyone else suffered a failure of the replacement HD unit as yet? See the picture below of the broken unit next to the new one. I have ordered yet another as a spare, which I will hopefully not need for another 4 years yet....



And despite washing my hands even more regularly than for COVID-19 reasons, I still can't get that smell off my fingers.....

It looks like it tried to blow up!

Bad luck Phil, let's hope this is a one off and not the start of a trend.

Was it a genuine HD or a pattern unit and hard mounted or on bobbins?

On the up side great news about the handling and look forward to hearing more (and whether the tyres are in the bin )

Pattern, but what I thought was a good one (about 70 GBP), hard-mounted, and had been quite happily for 4 or maybe 5 years. Newly ordered spare is around 100 GBP and claims to be above OEM quality, so let's see....

Night Dragons available free to anyone who thinks they get on with them. Blockleys will be mated to lovely alloy rims this week. Empire and Ohlins half on as I type this.....

I had a Harley clone regulator fail on the way to Portugal last year, followed by finding out that the spare that I carried had two identical black wires to connect to the earth and +ve feeds; the wrong guess led to semi frying the spare before I realised and swapped them over to the correct way round. Got home from Caramulo on Mario's regulator. I now have two Drag Specialties Harley clone regulators; one fitted and working and one all set with cable protection, correct terminals, fasteners and cable ties ready to fit on when required.

First I've seen of this. My H-D unit is going on 7 years without a glitch and is hard mounted. At least you had a visible symptom to follow up on. My stock Cycle-Electric unit died and looked fantastic! My biker buds said it was 'too delicate' while another just called it a 'POS'.

On our recent group trip to Wales my travelling spare HD rectifier was fitted to another M3W for the 3rd time when it's CE rectifier started showing 16.6v on the move. I have never had to use it myself yet as the original CE item has not been a problem since the new chassis mount was used following a chassis change in 2015. When fitted to the original engine mount it consumed two of them. When we fitted the HD rectifier and confidently fired the car up it failed to produce anything! The bonus of travelling in a group is that another HD clone rectifier was produced and this fixed the problem, a steady 14.4v was restored.

My well travelled HD spare was binned, I maybe should have kept it for investigation but room was tight. Although I have had no problems with the CE rectifier since 2015 (20,000 miles) I will be getting another spare HD rectifier, hopefully just to help other M3W owners out. If you are still wondering what is the most useful display to show on the Speedo, it's definitely Voltage, time and miles don't matter if you have no volts.

Interesting Ian. My replacement clone H-D unit now shows 14.1v, whereas the previous unit was 14.3/14.4v for the 4 or 5 years it was fitted. Until it showed 12.6v of course. And then spewed stinking juice.... My new clone replacement will go back into the onboard spares bag with so many others things :-)

Looking forward to pics and spec!