Repair of an old battery charger/Jump starter

[Thelanie]

Hello good people of the blog.

My father is an old mechanic and he had an old battery charger/jump starter it has served him well for almost 30 years but it has now finally broken down, when i turn it on and start to charge a battery it works fine on the two lowest current settings but if you turn it up any higher it snaps the main fuse in the house.. So both me and my father suspect that maybe the inductor inside it is shorting out.. I never tried to repair anything like this or even tried to troubleshoot one of these big inductors so it is a bit scary, anyone got some advice or a place i could start maybe? I opened the thing and took some pictures and the inductor does indeed look burned..

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

Best regards from Denmark!

[Thelanie]

One more picture of it

[Thelanie]

Two pictures of the inductor..

[tautech]

Two pictures of the inductor..

Welcome to the forum.

Yes that looks bad but needs testing with a DMM for shorts and such.
You may need to rewind it so some useful info is here:
https://ludens.cl/Electron/trafos/trafos.html

[Haenk]

A new charger with electronic control might be a much better choice (for battery health) than the oldschool timer method. I would not spend money on a new transformer (which probably is much more expensive than a new charger...)
gammeldags is not always better
Retro-fitting might be an idea, if your father really wants to keep it for sentimental reason...

[Thelanie]

Two pictures of the inductor..

Welcome to the forum.

Yes that looks bad but needs testing with a DMM for shorts and such.
You may need to rewind it so some useful info is here:
https://ludens.cl/Electron/trafos/trafos.html

Thank you for the reply. i will try to look at the website you gave me.

[Thelanie]

A new charger with electronic control might be a much better choice (for battery health) than the oldschool timer method. I would not spend money on a new transformer (which probably is much more expensive than a new charger...)
gammeldags is not always better
Retro-fitting might be an idea, if your father really wants to keep it for sentimental reason...

We have several smaller modern chargers to keep batteries from motorcycles and such healthy through the winther, we really more used it as a booster for when we had an older car or motorcycle that needed a little extra juice to start, we have a lot of old Honda GL1000/1100 and the starters on these machines are not always too good... And it was just handy to give them the last bit of power But thanks for the idea of some sort of retro fitting, i try to look into that aswell, and i know you are correct "Gammeldags" is not really always better.. but oh quality was just more of a thing before i think