Yeah, but how's yer transmission?
-----Original Message-----
From: David Lieb [mailto:dbl@chicagolandmgclub.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 8:06 PM
To: Spridgets
Subject: Alternator Wiring
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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