WEEMS & PLATH The 12 Volt Doctor's Alternator Book

This is one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of 12 Volt batteries, alternators and systems. It does take some work getting through all of the detail, but it is a real education in 'how it actually works'.If you have questions in your head about how it really works. this is the book I would pick to read.

This book is totally out of date...it would be appropriate for alternators used in the mid 70's to mid 80's. There appear to be some schematic errors in the illustrations...Thumbs down

The nuts and bolts of the subject were well covered. The illustrations were not to the standard I was expecting - this is after all a technical manual - and there were a surprising number of typographical errors. Should you want to modify,repair or just understand alternators then this book will do the job.

Bastante bien

The 12 volt doctor's alternator book is poorly written and illustrated. It appears as if an editor has never gone through the text since it contains numerous typos, construction, and grammatical errors. Much of the information is dated and of little use. The printing is low quality and in places unreadable. This book is a real disappointment.

Alternators can sometimes be a big mystery, they usually just stop working without any darned warning. Those old grizzled guys at your local alternator/starter shop aren't talking, and you can't take one apart, they are all soldered together like some Alien spacecraft. But the author, Mr. Edgar Beyn, tirelessly and thinking of good for the common man, took apart thousands of alternators in his career, and made this rather complicated old tech understandable to the few of us that still want to know. There are hand made drawings of circuits, probably one of the last book ever published with this level of graphics in the World, with detailed descriptions of the various manufacturer's mostly older alternators and regulators, those that are typically found on older marine engines. But this is not a bad thing, learn this level of old tech, then you are ready for the newer designs that are unfortunately ten times more arcane. This is not a book to simply fix some cranky alternator in minutes, (you wish!) but instead is the ONLY source to learn useful alternator and regulator information on the planet, unless you want to go to the school of hard knocks and major in "Hammer" for 25 years. A very cool set of drawings in the back of the book shows dozens of alternator wire colors and pin outs covering 90% of what is out there to this day. And yes, there are a few fuzzy descriptions, but everything in this book is correct and will get a somewhat technical mind on the right track, especially if you have all these colored wires, and don't quite know where they go...