Starter Generator blew up--never seen this before

[Fairtax4me]

The only way rebuilding them is worth the effort is if you have the equipment to do it properly, so mostly machining the commutator, cleaning and balancing the armature, and replacing the bearings without ruining any parts of the case ends.

New brushes are inexpensive, but unless the commutator is perfectly smooth it will eat them to shreds in no time. There is also a wear limit to how much wear can happen to the face of the commutator before it's unusable because the material that's left will be too thin to machine or else will warp or come apart during use.

If the screws that hold it together break because of rust, the pulley is seized on the shaft, the shaft needs to be re-worked because of fretting or galling, or any of the windings in the case or the armature are bad then there's no point in rebuilding it.

Re-winding an armature is next to impossible. Those pretty much just have to be replaced if they're shorted or damaged. Shorted armatures are quite common because of armature stalling from slow cranking or the battery being dead and not able to overcome the compression of the motor. It overheats the windings and fries them, or it peels up the commutator bars, which then destroy the brushes and brush holder, which then destroys the rest of the case and windings with it. There's no good way to repair a damaged armature, it just gets chucked and replaced, and the armature is usually the most expensive part of the motor

Rewinding the case is not so bad if you have the equipment to do it, but that equipment is expensive and you would need to do hundreds of them to pay for it. Then you have much higher labor charge and materials charge because re-winding requires new copper, and it requires disassembly and re-assembly of the entire motor.

Once you get into that territory it's a lot cheaper for the customer to put a $250 aftermarket starter on it.
You don't wanna know what an OEM costs these days (and they're still made in China btw). That's not to say that made in China is always a bad thing, since CC has been using China made starter gens for decades, and so have many other golf carts.
Quality comes down to what the parts supplier asks for to be made when producing these aftermarket replacements. Cheaper sells better, and has higher margins.

As far as aftermarket starter gens go, there are a handful that seem to have decent reputations, but they're names like Red-hawk or ADC, and I'm not familiar with any of them so I can't really make a good recommendation there. I feel for you being stuck between the rock and the pickle jar. I've worked for a shop in a similar situation with average automobiles and all it does is frustrate and give you a bad name in the end. The end answer is that people either pay up, or they do without.

[nickdalzell1]

Since a good 90% of our customers are people who literally run their carts into the ground (I mean literally--rolled over, crushed, nothing left of the seat except the wood, covered head to toe in mud) the situation will likely get worse with time.

Given how most carts are getting more and more computerized the expense is starting to kill our business. Customers don't like hearing that those cheap $50 Rural Kings they installed blew their $650 controller box from low voltage. If they just paid the $950 for Trojans they'd save that $650 in addition to the $650 + 950 + labor.

I really wish common sense existed around Hooterville (that's what I'm calling our area since it literally mirrors Green Acres with the exception of not having the train)

I'm starting to feel our business is going through what happened to a ton of businesses when Walmart began to be a thing. Once, businesses thrived on quality and customer satisfaction. You paid more, you got more. That higher quality meant good reputation and that meant more customers, and more $$$, then they had kids and they were future customers. That's why electronics companies such as Zenith and RCA had such a great start over a company such as ZingPing from China, which would be lucky to last a few days after warranty.

I'm old. I don't like everything being 'Made in China'. I've never had anything that was 'Made in America' fail ever. At least, if it did, it was repairable. Try to open up a Lester Summit II to fix it when it fails a day after the warranty runs out (god I hate how the last USA name went to Chinesium still!!). You can't. It was designed to be landfill fodder and this thing called 'recurring revenue' is so commonplace. Unlike in the 1960s, people don't care about being screwed over so they keep buying. Their attention spans are shorter and they cannot fathom how that little $150 charger adds up over a few years from replacements over and over again.

I wish things would just go back to when customer satisfaction (and calling them customers! not consumers!) was the highest priority and when customers, not shareholders, dictated the demand and decisions of the company. When higher quality, longer-lasting stuff makes the business and the crap kills a business. You'd NEVER find Kmart selling crap and staying in business for long back then. No company would make a year doing that. I'd like to know what exactly changed because it seemed to have changed in a day.

Also, why the frell does a charger need to be super smart anyway? I mean things like Bluetooth. Come on! A charger has to do one, very simple job, and that shouldn't even need one single IC inside it, just a timer, transformer, capacitor and a couple diodes. They worked that way for decades and lasted forever. I will NEVER understand these plastic, epoxied pieces of crap that boldly, proudly proclaim 'MADE IN CHINA' in large letters.

I was seriously hoping post-pandemic that the anger towards China (as well as their communist policies) for bringing the Covid 19 mess out to begin with would invalidate them as a manufacturer. Heck, I had hopes when the videos of suicide nets at the Foxconn factory before that would make people reconsider made in USA again. What does it take to get quality stuff from this country back?

[nickdalzell1]

Just a followup, the second starter never exploded but I'm still nervous about it in the future. The effort to put a starter generator on a Precedent with a back seat kit for example requires Yoga skills or cat-like abilities. Imagine one of those exploding on me.

We've put 100+ of those Red Hawk starters on and that was the only one that blew up. We've had some stop charging, or burn the brushes out but never explode on anyone.

That starter didn't just shoot out asbestos looking fiber bits either like have been reported here. It literally exploded into pieces; The entire silver portion was all over the street and the engine. No warning, just....BOOM! It sounded at first like the engine grenaded. Locked the rear up too since you couldn't turn the engine over with it still attached.

[meimk]

We had a whole pallet of Red Hawk starters that we bought at a special "sale" price a couple years ago. The first 1/2 dozen or so we installed came apart within a few days of install. We never tried the rest. We negotiated a return of all on them. They changed suppliers and we slowly started buying them again. Things were ok again till lately when they started coming apart again. We tried a different vendor, questioned them about their supply line. Now those are coming apart. We are in that same position of telling people those starters are going to have to be o.e.m. at twice the price.