On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:15:01 -0500, GeoLane at PTD dot NET wrote:
On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:53:18 -0500, GeoLane at PTD dot NET wrote:
That's not the problem though. It's putting out 16V, which I suspect
will fry the little U1 battery.

On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:16:20 +0700, john B. Slocomb wrote:

Rectifying the output of a small engine's alternator and feeding
straight to the battery is very common. Nearly all of the smaller
Japanese motorcycles are made that way,

What I'd is to fire things up and check the voltage at the battery
terminals, if the actual battery voltage doesn't get over about 14 volts
then I wouldn't worry about it. My guess is that you'll be getting
closer to 14 volts with the engine running.

It's feeding 16V to the battery when it's running and the battery is
connected.

How many amps might I anticipate being sent to the battery? I didn't
have much success measuring the amps last evening, but I may have time
to try that again over the weekend. I don't want to fry my VOM. I had
tried on the 10A setting and didn't get a reading. I dropped to the
next lowest range - 500 mA, but still didn't get a reading.

With current that low, you can put a 1, 10, or 100 ohm resistor
in series to measure voltage drop, and calculate current. For
example, if you measure 0.5 volts across a 100 ohm resistor,
I = E/R = .5/100 = 5 mA.

If you are measuring 16V DC across a 12V lead-acid battery at low
current, something is wrong with the measurement or the battery.
Do you have an oscilloscope? Maybe your voltmeter is measuring
peak voltage of spikes, although that's not something I would
expect if you are actually using a mechanical-meter-movement
VOM rather than a DVM, and are measuring on a DC volts range.

--
jiw