Quote:
Originally Posted by Skidmark
They definitely don't make em like they use to. Growing up I remember seeing various chargers at auto repair shops, old guys garages, school shop class etc.. most of them looked like they had been through hell and yet they still worked as originally intended.
The last 2 I bought within the last 3-4 years, looked great out if the box, but we're very light weight and cheap feeling. The worst part is that they seem to only work intermittently. Some time they charge some time it takes a couple tries. Bottom line I don't have any confidence in them.
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My experience is identical to yours. I have an old charger that was made in the late 1960s... it's got chrome on it, and looks like something out of the Jetsons. It's hilarious. It came with the house that I bought (along with a bunch of old Chilton's repair manuals from the 20s and 30s). It ALWAYS works... ALWAYS...
It doesn't have the output that some of the newer ones do, and you can literally hear it, but it always works, every time.
MOST of the new chargers have various levels of circuitry that the old ones did not, and this lends them to being ineffective and often failure prone. Vast majority of the ones you buy will be smart chargers, that need some feedback before they'll even allow you to charge a battery, and despite saying they know what's best, they either fail to fully charge, or never shut off and overcharge a battery.
You want to look for chargers that have a "manual charge" feature. I don't know why they call it that, but basically it bypasses all the nonsense.
This is one that I bought... it's the same Chinese crap one, but just with a different name:
https://www.amazon.com/Outerman-Auto...dp/B087BXGK3Z/
It has a dedicated switch that allows you to bypass all the nonsense and just charge it. All the other chargers that I've bought will refuse to charge a battery that it thinks is dead... even though they still claim they can charge a dead battery. If it doesn't have a manual switch, then don't even bother getting it.
The manual switch basically makes it act like the old-school chargers that we all had in the 90s and 2000s.