The others’ comments summarize the situation pretty well: Those old 6 volt, 3-brush generators simply weren’t designed to charge at idle. So a modest discharge at idle (and at RPMs a bit above idle...) is perfectly normal.
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As JimN points out in his post, the situation can be helped by installing a smaller pulley on the generator to spin it faster. However it is not without potential problems:
1 – Driving the generator faster wears out the brushes/commutator proportionally faster.
2 – The 3-brush generator design is not very energy efficient. Ie. a significant fraction of the shaft energy going into the generator is wasted as heat in the windings. Spinning the generator faster creates more heat inside the generator. And a hotter generator = shorter generator life!
3 – Overspinning the generator increases the risk of destroying (“birdnesting”) the armature should the engine ever overspeed due to governor failure, rolling down a hill too fast, etc.
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Today's Featured Article - An Old-Time Tractor Demonstration - by Kim Pratt. Sam was born in rural Kansas in 1926. His dad was a hard-working farmer and the children worked hard everyday to help ends meet. In the rural area he grew up in, the highlight of the week was Saturday when many people took a break from their work to go to town. It was on one such Saturday in the early 1940's when Sam was 16 years old that he ended up in Dennison, Kansas to watch a demonstration of a new tractor being put on by a local dealer. It was an Allis-Chalmers tractor dealership,
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