Thanks! Actually my brother has a small home machine shop in his garage and he likes to tinker as well. He had several small motors lying around and gave me one. We machined that roller from a piece of aluminum he had. I had the trainer and use it a lot during winter already. The only things I purchased were the diode and watt meter. I made the plastic diode box at work.
Ok, I ran a test last night. I was WRONG about the motor producing more power with a diode. As a matter of fact, I think the diode robbs some wattage as it read higher when the diode was bypassed. Very interesting, you might be onto something with the switch.
I tried to keep as consistent cadence as possible while my girlfriend connected and disconnected a jumper several times to bypass the diode. Everytime it was bypassed the wattage went up by about 10 watts while resistance remained the same. Not sure how accurate the test is this way because of the constant fluctuation but we did it several times.
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