Alternator relocation gone wrong...

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Joined
Mar 15, 2006
Threads
169
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5,385
Location
Durham, NC
As part of the power steering convesion on my 40 I needed to swap the alternator from the lower driver side (original 1F location) to the high passenger side (2F location) of the engine.

This should have been a .1 :banana: job. Find the factory mount and tension adjuster, unplug alternator wires, remove alternator, mount said 2F bracket and alternator, splice orginal alternator wires and extend then so they reach the passenger side, plug wires back in and done :steer:.

Not so much in my case.

After I completed all steps above and tried to crank the truck it turned over 5-6 times but no start. No big deal as the carb was empty and needed to be filled with enough gas to start. So I added some choke, pumped the gas, turned the key and nothing but click, click, click.

Pulled the 80 in the garage thinking the battery might have been dead on the 40. Tried jumping to 40 and nothing but clicks...however this time I got a little magic smoke from the ground wire (W/Blk) on the voltage regulator below the brake booster on the drivers side firewall. I didn't ruin the regulator just heated up the wire plastic cover to the point it smoked a bit.

So what is up???

The alternator is a OEM 3 wire. Two wires are plugged via a connector and are routed to the voltage regulator and the other connected on the back of the alternator routed directly to the positive terminal on the battery. This is the way it was connected before the move and everything worked fine.

I don't think my starter and/or solenoid are shot b/c they were recently replaced by Casey before I bought the truck (within the past 5 years but less than 3k miles on it).

BTW - I checked the battery and it reads 12.6 volts as it sits in the truck now.

I'm going to clean and replace my negative terminal and frame ground and clean/replace the starter to frame ground strap tonight to rule those out.

Any other troubleshooting ideas would be awesome.

Thanks is advance!!
 
Sounds like a grounding issue to me. Use a mulitmeter between the ground pin on the alt and the engine block and make sure you have a good ground.

:beer: R
 
Yep bad ground was the problem. Cleaned and relocated the previous grounds to the correct places and she cranks and starts fine now.

On to my next problem with my mechanical throttle linkage bottoming out on the intake manifold....ggrrrrr
 
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