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Hi, John. You are only partially correct and that's only when you gots the right kind of armature short. In my case, the kind of short that one can find with a $10 multimeter (your example) never happens and instead, the windings short only to themselves - and THIS kind of short, ONLY a growler can find. To restate things, the growler will find both kinds of shorts and the multimeter can only find the rare type of short. And that means... ONLY a growler test can give a 100% good to go status to an armature. The multimeter findable short happens a short time after one keeps on using a generator with the growler "only" findable short - believe that part if nothing else, they do NOT fix themselves and can only go from bad to worse and in a jiffy. The real trouble here is that once you have a generator that is dragging you have only a minute of running time to stop using the generator or you'll cook it past the point of being usable ever again. AND if it has ANY shorted windings no matter if it's the multimeter type or the growler "only" type, of course it's just plain done for. My Uncle gave me his old growler a few summers back figuring I had more use for it than he did. At the time, I had an armature to test and knew he had one, so we dug it out from under a bunch of junk and set about to give it whirl in the back yard. It turns out that this one was a "complete" tester in that it also could test for open windings in that it had a 110 volt, 100 watt light bulb with two probes ready to go. When you touched the probes together, the light bulb would light up, nice and bright. This sure would find that winding that was shorted to the shaft!! Just don't be touching anything metal when you do... And stay away from any mud or water or... Talk about being nervous. Old dirty wooden handled probes just screamed "I'll shock you" at me, the rotten and falling off wire insulation was no treat to look at either. I'm thinking this part of my new growler will be electrically disconnected and not used any further... I can use the $10 multimeter for these tests which DO need to be done as well as the basic growler test for shorted windings. My armature passed the test BTW, with no causalities either, thankfully. One oldtimer generator tip I can pass on to others is to look for ring of slung solder inside the generator case at the brush end. When an armature gets too hot, the solder connecting the windings to the copper commutator strips melts and gets thrown out against the case in a very noticable ring of little solder beads. Being very easy to overlook, one often only "sees" it when he is reminded to look for it, but once you've found it you can pretty much just count on buying a new generator at that point. Any further diagnosis is a total waste of time. It's kind of like finding those blue laminations of an armature I mentioned before - they are not a good symptom to see either.
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