I've been running my system for a few weeks now, and its taking an amazingly long time to charge these batteries.

I'm using two 8AH batteries, and its taking it like 3 days to get them up .6 v.. Is there anything I'm doing wrong?

Ewhaz, with my 2000 turn trifilar on the bicycle wheel, charging caps with mechanical switch discharge, a few hours they would have a really good strong charge.

What are the coil and components you're using? Magnets, rotor size, caps you're charging. Your doing discharge with a 555 circuit? What voltage are caps before you discharge?

If the battery is not damaged and is really in good shape, I would take it off the SG, charge it to 14+ with a normal hot charger until good and full. Then drain it with a resistive load down to 12, do that a couple times. Then as soon as it is drained, then hook it to the sg charger.

The battery just may need to be reformed.

I'm using the 555/scr set up to discharge my caps into my batteries. The hard part about this is I'm still waiting for the proper caps to use for this circuit, as it's designed, but they are still on their way in from an oversea EBAY purchase. I went and cannibalized some disposable camera's to get the caps from them, and since they are so large they take longer to charge to any decent voltage, I'm only reading about 22 to 23 volts across them, where ass the other caps where getting into the 150v range. I've already hardwired my 555 circuit so I can't easily change the timing to let the caps charge higher.

I was also testing to see if dumping the coil directly into the battery (after the rectifier of course) would change the charging. It hasn't seemed to make any difference. I've got two more batteries on the way, I'll charge them up and discharge them like you suggested to start fresh when I finish getting all my componants.

I did want to ask about discharging the batteries. I have been using small 14v lamps wired in series to discharge the batteries, they were rated at .2 amps, which I figured would give me .8 ams overall for a C20 rating (with the two 8ah batteries in parallel) But I didn't get any decent discharge until I put two of the lamps in parallel. I can't seem to measure amps on my meter, it just cuts off anything behind it so I don't get any idea of the amp usage, only the amps available. How can I calculate the exact load for discharging these batteries at a C20 rating.

The best results I've had is with LARGE capacitance banks and only charging 2-3 volts above the battery voltage....around 14-16 or so. What is the largest capacitance you can come up with with the caps you have? You can probably find some 33,000 uf 60v's on ebay pretty cheap. I found some years ago on ebay for about $5 each.

With too high of voltage pulsing too quick, there isn't enough current to get the batts in real charging mode.

Right now, the caps I have on hand are some 450v 3.3 uf caps and two 330v 80uf caps.

So your saying that as long as I'm getting about 2 to 4 volts over my topmost battery charge then I'm Ok?

With high capacitance impulses that is. The capacitance of the caps you're using seem too small. A couple hundred uf's at minimum is really good for the capacitive discharges at a couple volts above the batteries. Even 15-30k uf would help improve your results.