'82 Alternator rebuild

[daves79x]

Greasing the plates upon reassembly won't hurt, just remember that immediately upon start-up, oil is forced in between the plates and when warmed up will completely wash the grease off the plates anyway. You are just preventing scuffing upon first startup. If you turn the engine over with the kill switch off until oil pressure is built, I see no real need to grease the plates. I never have anyway.

Dave

[Rick Pope]

As CBX-tras said above, the coupler slips when the rpm changes. Sooo, if you're that rider that bangs through the gears, or does lots of shifting while sport riding, you can expect much shorter clutch life than the person who tours, and/or rides smoothly. It's just the nature of the beast.

[hondaman160mph]

Here's my alternator drive plates after being resurfaced by Tom at TrueDisk. A total of .5mm removed from both plates.
They're now perfectly flat. I have a 1.5mm washer to add to the spring. If you don't want to hand lap yours on the bench Tom charged $75.00. and
I had them back in 3 days.

[CBX-tras]

Tom - He's my home boy!

[NobleHops]

Tom skipped a step, which is a surprise. We developed this particular service with him, with some iteration and trial and error. You must chamfer those oil flinger grooves. If you don’t then the material at the edge will break off and grind lovely new scars in your fresh plates. We learned that one the hard way and once we added that step there was no more issue. We did it ourselves fairly crudely with hand tools, Tom did it better on the following 15 or so sets he did for us on a mill.

[hondaman160mph]

Tom skipped chamfering at my request, I chamfered
the oil grooves myself using a emery stone. He
charged me $75.00, if he would have cut the oil grooves
deeper and chamfered them the price would be $150.00

[NobleHops]

That is worthwhile information for us to have shared with readers of this thread. I’ll say I do NOT recommend the $75 DIY service, Those oil flinger grooves are properly 1mm deep on an NOS plate (we measured),and the restrictor plug at the end of the primary shaft is injecting high pressure oil into this area. Honda engineered this with 1mm grooves to evacuate this oil, presumedly so the oil pressure would not exceed the clamping pressure of the spring and cause the two plates to ‘float’. Do you think you should halve that? The knowledge about the importance of the chamfer was learned the hard way. Let Tom do it, that’s my advice. We developed this service with him at our request and he’s done roughly 25 sets for us, and we’ve rebuilt 15 or so alternators with them, and sold a few sets more.

[daves79x]

Indeed!

Dave

[EMS]

I am using a dry graphite lubricant during assembly of metal parts that rely on lubrication to work on each other. It is a product that is being used during engine assembly in the racing world. It is similar to MoS2

[hondaman160mph]

Thanks for the great info Nils. On that same note I
doubt anyone here that has hand lapped their alternator
plates on the bench has cut the oil grooves any deeper.

[NobleHops]

The A plate with the grooves can be hand-lapped to restore flatness and remove a work-hardened surface if it’s not too bad, we’ve done that too. We measured an NOS plate and found it conical by .002, aka 2 thousandths. So if you were lapping one flat, that’s about as much as you’d be removing, 1/2mm is (EDIT) 20 thou. Just so future readers have the info.

My summary advice: if you’re lapping them to remove minor damage, you’re fine. If you’re grinding them to remove more substantial damage, you should restore the depth of the oil flinger groove to 1mm and chamfer both edges too. Hope that helps.

[oldbikerdude]

Hey Nils, just a slight correction on your comment.
1 mm is 0.040" (really 0.03937")
so 1/2 mm is 0.020"

[NobleHops]

Crap, you're absolutely right. I will go back and revise those posts for accuracy, thanks for piping up.