The Ford Barn - 8BA Startup

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I fired up my 8BA today. This is probably the first time this motor has run for many years. This is the one I was working on last winter. I put in new rings, con rod bearings, some new valves, new valve springs and honed the cylinders. You may recall I also repaired two cracks with Irontite plugs and received a lot of input from this forum. Once I located my very ancient timing light and got it to work, the motor fired right up once I got the timing mark on the pulley lined up with the pointer. I only ran it a few minutes because I still need to connect the radiator but I wanted to hear some thunder.

I do have a question. The motor is just sitting on a cart made out of a shopping cart which came with the motor when I bought it and is not connected to anything. Somewhere I seem to recall that one should not run the generator without having it connected to something even if it's only grounded. Is this true? I see three connections on the generator which I believe should be Field, Ground, and Battery but I'm not sure which is which. Any advice would be appreciated. I don't know if the generator is any good but I'd hate to wreck it.

I believe this was posted by JSEERY.....

Ain't it SWEET! Chap

Generators don´t care about running unloaded..alternators is the ones that have a bad habbit of frying the solidstate parts in them.

3 brush generator needs a battery to control voltage, without a battery the voltage can go over 45 volts and it will fry, the smoke will come out of the windings This is because the third brush powers up the fields. They say these generator need output grounded, a 2 brush generator needs the fields externally excited there's not enough magnetic field for it to fry itself

Running the engine without coolant is a good way to start cracking

Even a 3-brush generator won´t manage to kill itself testfiring an engine for a short time...
The windings have to heat up enough to damage the insulation before bad things start to happen.
Grounding the output would be like a short making the generator put out all it has and heat up...a load like a large bulb or a battery may be a better choice.

Thanks everyone. I think I'm good to go.

Not good to keep running an engine not under load like on an engine stand.
This has been discussed on Fordbarn.