Onan And Dynamotor Tech

Description

Switched on April 17. Still running on the solstice.

Al Francoeur’s full 125-minute presentation on his dynamotor and Onan motor-generator work, recorded live at the 2026 Energy Science & Technology Conference.

Francoeur turned Dynamo No. 1 on in his rebuilt power shop on April 17 and did not turn it off until June 21, the solstice, because he had to leave for this conference. Day and night at about 700 rpm, with two squirts of bearing grease once a month, he transferred recovered output toward the property’s 24-volt battery system. Before the shop damage that forced the rebuild, the same machine had run six months and fifteen days. Three dynamos are built, and No. 4 is 90 percent complete.

Francoeur is the founder of Magnetic Energy Systems Inc. and the developer of the EMA pulse-motor and generation systems. He has been off-grid for eight years, since he refused a smart meter and the utility cut him off, on wind, solar and his own machines. He winds every coil by hand. He owns original Ed Gray EMA motors, including the gold motor and E4, and the power supply he identifies as the only surviving Richard Hackenberg unit. He acquired five vintage Onan LK units, converted four generator heads and acquired three 10-kilowatt Kohler generators to investigate related designs. This is the bench report on all of it.

He draws one line at the start and holds it: “pending third-party independent verification of all energy systems, I will refrain from stating over unity or efficiencies in these energy systems.” What he gives instead is the apparatus, the wiring, the run times, the scope traces and the burned bulbs, in enough detail that you can build the same thing.

WHAT YOU’LL SEE IN THE FULL PRESENTATION

• The three-battery system: battery A drives the pulses, battery B charges from the generator coils on rotor speed, battery C charges from the inductive collapse, and the harder you load the rotor the bigger the spike into C. His switching circuit mounts directly on a removable coil module.
• The coils, and why two of them caught fire: 59 feet of magnet wire on a classical coil versus 10 feet a side on his double-helix mirror-image coil, the amorphous ribbon cores wound magnetically hollow, the red tape marking the hot side of the core, and the smoke-in-the-room morning that made him rewind everything.
• The simplest switching circuit he could build: one 1-megohm resistor, a hall sensor, one 100-volt MOSFET, no pulse-width modulator, terminal studs instead of a circuit board, every conductor oxygen-free copper. “I should own a copper mine.”
• Full power at 180 rpm: a 35-pound rotor barely turning, an incandescent lamp bank at full brightness, powered by ten-year-old worn-out truck batteries that, he says, came back to life on the pulses.
• 1,400 rpm straight off the solar panels: 120-volt AC bulbs, 400 watts glowing, the machine dipping and recovering as clouds cross the sun, and his vacuum-tube shortwave radios running off the AC side.
• The numbers on the meters: the higher battery B and C readings he reports, including 12.11 volts at the input and 30.55 on C, and a center-tap neutral reading zero volts while pulses light a bulb as he loads the rotor by hand.
• The night the rotor reversed itself: a 35-pound rotor slowing to a stop and spinning back up the other way, witnessed by two people, and his suspicion that vibration shifted a Hall sensor.
• Dynamo No. 3 and No. 4: the all-new No. 3 with phenolic stator plates, X-vertex crossover wiring between opposing coils and classical generator coils in the same machine for a side-by-side comparison, and No. 4, 90 percent built, which swaps the coil order to put the generator coils nearest the rotor.
• Closed loop: battery B through an inverter and a bench supply into six 1-farad capacitors, battery A switched out, the rotor still at 700 rpm under load at 12.65 volts.
• Dual-rotor Dynamo No. 2: two 35-pound rotors north-to-north and south-to-south on non-magnetic planetary gears, an iron flux gate that Francoeur says changes repulsion on one side into attraction, a quarter-inch gap no two men could close by hand, and 900-plus rpm.
• The Onan LK light plants: five 1964 light plants found in fire stations and on Kijiji, four converted to rotary transformers, set beside the Onan LK in Robert Alexander’s patent.
• The discharge that burns the bulbs: close the series field switch at 24 volts and high rpm, a bang like the one in Ed Gray’s 1986 demonstration-cart video, the rotor slams to a stop, twelve 100-watt bulbs flash like a camera and half-inch forked arcs form inside the glass. The faster it stops, the bigger the burst.
• The waveform he asks the room about: a trace like a field of hay, 15-kilohertz pulses from the Onan slip rings on a forklift Curtis controller, seen on a digital scope and again on a vacuum-tube analog scope, and the audience member who says it is the same envelope as the golden ratio discharge.
• The Q&A: ignitrons versus MOSFETs, GaN FETs, short coils versus long, the rewound EMA motors and what wire Gray’s originals might have carried, and what it would take to put a Kohler into a Volkswagen as an analog EV that motors and generates at the same time.

A machine that motors and generates at the same time

The dynamo is a brushless permanent-magnet motor-generator. Francoeur calls it a magnetic paddle wheel: a hydro dam needs the sun to lift the water that turns the wheel, and this takes the water out. Ten-and-a-quarter-inch phenolic rotors carry neodymium magnets around a steel keeper ring so the ring becomes the magnetic neutral and the pole strength doubles. Twelve poles on the rotor, ten coil positions at 36 degrees on the stator, Lexan and phenolic throughout, stainless axles. Loading the shaft increases current draw and, in his tests, the recovered inductive-collapse spike, which he directs through Schottky diodes to battery C. In his words, “the EVs aren’t doing that.”

“Well, this is my fourth machine now. And again, it’s working. Again and again. It’s repeatable.”

Al Francoeur, ESTC 2026

The Onan, the Kohler and the Alexander patent

The second half of the talk is old iron. The 1964 Onan LK is a 2.5-kilowatt light plant with a single-cylinder multi-fuel engine, AC slip rings and a DC commutator on the same rotor, which Francoeur uses in his motor-generator experiments. Francoeur puts the Onan from the Robert Alexander patent beside his own restored units and shows the same machine design. Run the restored Onan on 24 volts through a 5-ohm potentiometer and you can trade axle torque for AC output and back with a twist of the knob, eight 100-watt bulbs on the wall. In his words, “Why would they spend so much money if there wasn’t something to it?” Then he scales up: three vintage 10-kilowatt Kohler generators, two from retired yachts, one from a junkyard for $500 with 2,100 hours on it, and a pair of Onan stators mounted in mirror image 180 degrees apart to try for a standing wave.

“What do you call that? Is it real or not, or is it an error? Both scopes showed it.”

Al Francoeur, ESTC 2026

The EV argument

Francoeur contrasts an EV drawing more battery power on a climb with his dynamotor: when he increases mechanical load, he observes larger recovered pulses into battery C. He proposes one battery for driving and another for recovery, with separate generator coils tied to rotor speed. His plan is to put a Kohler into a Volkswagen on a four-speed and use the car as the flywheel, an analog EV that motors and generates at the same time. He puts it plainly: “Where’s Elon Musk? Just saying.” Whether it extends range is the question he wants answered on the road, not on a slide.

“I don’t use LED lights at all. I want lights that load the system down.”

Al Francoeur, ESTC 2026

Who this is for

The builder whose pulse motor runs an hour and cooks a coil. The experimenter who has heard a hundred over-unity claims and wants to watch a machine that just keeps running, from a man who refuses to make the claim. The person with an old Onan or Kohler in the barn who did not know what was inside it. The researcher following Bedini, Gray and EMA hardware who wants to see Francoeur’s machines alongside his original motor collection and Hackenberg power supply. The EV tinkerer who asked the question in the Q&A.

You do not need to be an engineer. The talk is photographs and video from the shop: the hives, the firewood, the rotor spinning on a full-moon night, the bulbs, the smoke, the meters. The circuit is simple enough that he shows every part number. Is it just theory: he supplies photographs, demonstrations and measurements, and when a scope trace might be an instrument error he says so and checks a second scope. Why 125 minutes: three completed dynamos and a fourth in progress, four converted Onan heads, acquired Kohlers, Gray hardware, the recirculation test and Q&A. The MP4 is yours to keep.

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125 minute downloadable video presentation by Al Francoeur, recorded live at the 2026 Energy Science & Technology Conference

After this presentation you will understand how Francoeur combines motor and generator circuits, why he reports larger recovery pulses under load, what he found in the Onan hardware, and how he kept Dynamo No. 1 running from April to the solstice.