1972 Beetle 1600dp voltage regulator making clicking sounds

[Marc]

If you have a lathe and tooling to undercut the mica you could restore the commutator, but if any bars are loose or if it needs rewinding I'd leave it to a specialty shop.

Changing generator brushes is simple enough. Helps to have a screw-holding driver. Make a hook from a piece of stiff wire / thin coathanger that you can use to pull out on the spring while slipping the old brush out and the new one in - do NOT tug it to the side as it may slide off its post, and getting it back on is not fun. The top brush is easy to access, the bottom one not so much. It can be done by Braille or if you're good at working while looking at a mirror. If all else fails you can loosen the belt & strap and remove the four 10mm-head bolts which secure the sheetmetal to the shroud, then rotate the whole generator around to make it easier to see what you're doing...but that usually also means removing the carburetor so it's worth trying to do it in place first (just remember what I said about not pulling the spring aside).

I haven't any experience with the Chinese clone generators or alternators, only Bosch (new, factory rebuilt, and locally rebuilt). New & factory rebuilt Bosch are all coming from Brazil these days and IMO aren't nearly as good as the German ones but they'll do.
Perhaps someone here who's run a Chinese one for a while can chime in with an opinion. I know of one local guy who's installed many of the Chinese alternators and likes them, but as a rule the cars he works on get driven very little (as in, one day a week in the summer) so none have enough miles on them IMO to base a judgment upon.

As I said above, for an alternator with over 55A capacity the stock wiring will serve fine, but for higher-output ones the wire from alternator B+ (formerly generator D+) to the new junction point under the seat is inadequate. No fuses are affected.