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Alternator Wiring

To: "Spridgets" <spridgets@autox.team.net>
Subject: Alternator Wiring
From: "David Lieb" <dbl@chicagolandmgclub.com>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 20:05:39 -0500
Just in case anyone is interested, I thought I would share something I 
discovered during the Babe Rally 2006.

No, it isn't anything earth-shattering, but it certainly made it a lot 
easier for me to get Mickey home again.

It is fairly easy to tell that Lucas was doing a lot of tinkering trying to 
get alternators to work properly during the early 70s. Or else they were 
trying to figure out how to make them as unreliable as their previous 
technology. At any rate, although all of the Lucas alternators I have seen 
use the same 3-wire connector on the back, some of the wiring harnesses 
(like Mickey's) only have two wires in them, the Sense and the Battery. The 
third wire, also a thiv\ck brown wire like the Battery wire also goes to the 
hot side of the starter solenoid, just like the Battery wire. My guess is 
that some Lucas alternators have the two wide connectors internally shorted 
together, but others do not.

When the regulator on Mickey's alternator died in Alabama, I grabbed the 
spare that Chris King had so generously provided and slapped it in. It did 
not work. Chris assured me that it had "run when parked", but it did not 
want to work in Mickey. I wondered about the empty slot in the connector and 
determined that the symptoms of not working were different for one 
configuration than for the other. Since the connectors are weird (go 
figure), it was not going to be trivial to re-create the 3-wire harness, so 
I grabbed my trusty soldering iron, pulled the back off of the alternator, 
and soldered a jumper between the two wide connectors. It worked like a 
charm and I have put a couple thousand miles on it since, including driving 
through the night without a hiccup.

So, if you replace the Lucas alternator on a car with only two wires in the 
harness, and the new alternator does not work, you might want to try this. 
Or not.
David Lieb
Team SU 




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