matthew, of all the things that greenpants has indicated, compounding is the most important, and the first thing that would need to be addressed before continuing with the other situations. I usually put car on inspection, and run the car by simulating the car running off the pie plate, in level speed. You just block out the associated relays in the generator leveling field circuit, and run the car up and down and make sure the level speed is within a couple of feet per minute. if they are way out, say 15 fpm up and 5 fpm down, then you need to recompound generator. if they are nearly equal, then i would look at making sure SF relay is picking up during leveling. if that is good then your lv ring brushes would be next, put new leveling brushes on if they are severely worn. as green pants indicates, load could also be a problem, if you have load weighing switches that are not indicating proper load, the the car would not approach the floor at the appropriate speed. If you have an otis controller that uses compensating fields, ie, it has HC,LC,RC,TC relays then you must set car speed at each load increment to obtain proper leveling. If you dont have a compensating field, then load weighing switches usually only affect hi speed up and down, usually the relays are PL, or NL, or ECU, ECD. Positive load, negative load, empty car up, empty car down. these wont usually affect leveling, unless they are way out of tolerance, say more then 50 or so fpm. usually when this circuit fails, you will trip the governor. any way after all that rambling, i would bet your compounding is off so start there.
