David,
A little clarification. The plug you refer to is attaching
to the rectifier assembly... or diodes. There are at least 2
varieties from Lucas. You've seen 2. If you peer in there, you'll see
3 plates. Some rectifiers had a big terminal going to each of 2
plates, with a small terminal at 1 plate (the closest to the center,
IIRC) Others had 3 plates, but the 2 large terminals actually were
together at the middle plate.
People who completely understand alternators (not me) will
know what the differences were. I know Lucas changed from battery
sensing to load sensing, or some-such. When we sold lots of these
components, there was a lot of head scratching over IDing which
terminal configuration of rectifier went with which regulator, as
Lucas started with a 5 wire regulator, and ended with a 2 wire, yet
they "all interchanged".
Good fix on your part.
Peter C.
====
At 08:05 PM 5/31/2006, David Lieb wrote:
>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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