six volt or twelve?

[poundingpancho53]

hey all, I have a 53 Pontiac straight 8 ( iwill try to post a pic) auto tranny. Wanna' leave it as stock as possible. BUT. I get a lot of grief from buddies that say go 12 volt and some say leave it a six volt.
There! the gaunlet has been thrown down!!!! ideas/opinions yada yada yada please!!!

 

[jmlcolorado]

hey all, I have a 53 Pontiac straight 8 ( iwill try to post a pic) auto tranny. Wanna' leave it as stock as possible. BUT. I get a lot of grief from buddies that say go 12 volt and some say leave it a six volt.
There! the gaunlet has been thrown down!!!! ideas/opinions yada yada yada please!!!

Who cares what anyone says? If everything works the way you want it to on 6 volts, leave it be.
Converting to 12 could be a chore.
If it were me, I'd tell my friends to pound sand and convert it to 24 volts, then tell them their junk is inferior

 

[Dr Crankenstein]

If it ain't broke...

.

 

[dmw56]

But 6 volts is broke if you plan on driving at night!

 

[Sam_Fear]

Gauges can be a pain to convert to 12v.

 

[earthman]

But 6 volt starters spin much much better when you hit them with 12.

 

[endicott_jb]

Coming from the ACVW world, this topic is brought up a lot. There's a lot of pros with converting to 12 volt. Batteries are easier and cheaper to find, bulbs are easier to find even if you're out in BFE Montana, and lights seam to be a helluva lot brighter. Cons are, it can screw with original gauges, if you don't have the right bulb sockets you can light your car on fire, brittle wires can sometimes just for no reason melt, and it is a bit of a chore. My thoughts are, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you really want to convert, wait until your generator goes out and convert then and go with an alternator rather than a 12 volt generator. But that's my opinion.

 

[Old Iron]

If all is working, I definitely would not go to the trouble

 

[donsrods]

Isn't one of the upgrades people have made to 6 volt cars is to install an 8 volt battery, or am I remembering that wrong ?

In the old days we used to install a 12 volt battery and use that for the starter and charging circuits and then we would run a stainless steel screw down into the top of the battery, exactly half way between the two posts, so it would touch the plates inside. At that point you could put a wire on that screw and you would have 6 volts coming out of it to run all the other stuff on the car, like the gauges, heater, etc.

I had a 53 Studebaker with a small block Chevy that was done like that. The downside was that the battery died a lot faster because of you drawing 6 volts out of half of it. But it was all we had back then.

Don

 

[Neto]

Isn't one of the upgrades people have made to 6 volt cars is to install an 8 volt battery, or am I remembering that wrong ?

In the old days we used to install a 12 volt battery and use that for the starter and charging circuits and then we would run a stainless steel screw down into the top of the battery, exactly half way between the two posts, so it would touch the plates inside. At that point you could put a wire on that screw and you would have 6 volts coming out of it to run all the other stuff on the car, like the gauges, heater, etc.

I had a 53 Studebaker with a small block Chevy that was done like that. The downside was that the battery died a lot faster because of you drawing 6 volts out of half of it. But it was all we had back then.

Don

I wonder if you could get diodes big enough to handle that sort of load. Then you could do as Don says here, but connect both 6 volt sides in parallel, with the diodes preventing any current return to the battery. That should produce an even draw on all of the cells. (Maybe just a hair-brained idea.)

 

[donsrods]

I sorta kinda remember that in the 50's-60's some companies were selling switch setups to do exactly what Neto mentioned. I think it was Almquist or JC Whitney, and it somehow took two 6 volt batteries and combined them for 12 volt starting and 6 volt everything else.

In the boating industry there are combiners that take two 12 volt batteries and treat them individually for charging and discharging, so maybe something like that would work for this 6 volt conversion.

Don