Both the neutral & ground wire need to terminate to earth, so they are both bonded to earth in the same (single!) location in the main box.
They are not bonded together any other place, or you ave a trap waiting to harm someone ro burn something down. maybe not today - but someday.
Think of your water system - one source of water comes into your house, it gets connected to your hot water heater. But you still get hot & cold water from the 2 different faucets at your sink. You can't interchange the faucets can you? Even tho the pipes are connected somewhere in your basement... One is hot, one is cold. You can't plumb them together any which way along the way & expect the hot & cold water to remain seperate, can you? Altho you would have _water_ from a faucet no matter how you plumbed it together, you need to do it right to get good hot and good cold water where you want it.
The _ground_ system is only there to protect you, and needs to always lead away from devices & metal things directly to the earth bond. Would be good if it is never even used, but if it is needed it _has_ to be wired right or bad things happen. In fact if it is wired wrong it can _cause_ the bad things.
The _neutral_ wire is part of the electrified circut at times and always needs to lead electricty back to earth.
If it were water, interchanging them or tying then together many times as you suggest would result in lukewarm water at all the faucets.
You don't want that.
Only with electricity the results can be shock or smoke, not just bad tasting water....
This does not address the original question on hot-wiring a generator setup. Just the diff between ground & neutral wire.
As to hotwiring the generator into a 3 prong plug - hope a lot of us are taking notes and prepare for this _now_ when we don't need it today, so we are prepared for it when we do need it. I understand 'this is an emergency & I need to do this even if it isn't quite code....'
But - ah - well shouldn't we all have prepared for this a little earlier? Plug things directly into your generator - that is how you are set up for with what you have. Doing this hotwiring stuff after it is needed - that's a person under stress working with items they don't quite understand & trying to make it all work....
Not trying to do salt into a wound. Just saying, now might not be the best time to try to figure out how to make electricity work safely. It's real easy to make electricity work - you can power things with only one wire & a ground rod - but how safe it is?
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Today's Featured Article - Third Brush Generators - by Chris Pratt. While I love straightening sheet metal, cleaning, and painting old tractors, I use every excuse to avoid working on the on the electrics. I find the whole process sheer mystery. I have picked up and attempted to read every auto and farm electrics book with no improvement in the situation. They all seem to start with a chapter entitled "Theory of Electricity". After a few paragraphs I usually close the book and go back to banging out dents. A good friend and I were recently discussing our tractor electrical systems when he stated "I figure it all comes back to applying Ohms Law". At this point
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