Well Autozone messed up and gave me alt #4 without taking alt #3 back. So now I've got two again. What a deal.

First thing I did was remove the intake and exhaust and intake manifolds again. (I did this earlier this summer to install that shiny new block heater there.)



Not a fun job but I've had much worse. This gave me good easy access to the wiring. I found a reading of 0.4 ohm on the two wires from the alt to the lug on the starter, and 0.4 from the two wires on the alt to the positive terminal on the battery. My multimeter was giving 0.1 connected to itself. Still, I thought 0.3 ohms of resistance was too much for a cable 14 inches long. After cutting off the old connectors at the alt, I found the bare wire was giving 0.1 ohm resistance in the same tests. So I crimped on the new connectors and assembled them in the new plug, then swapped in alt #4. Put everything back together and fired it up.

Since I've been driving the last couple of days with no alt, the battery when disconnected was reading 12.1vdc. Pretty low but then again there is something over a dozen starts in there, and I've been running the radio when driving as well as lights and wipers here and there. The aux fan however has remained disconnected. Once the engine was running at idle and the glow plug relay shut off, I got a reading of 12.8. Not very encouraging. It raises up when I rev the motor, maybe as high as 13.5. It was late though so I just said "f-it", put the tools away, shut off the car and placed the external charger on the battery. I'm hoping to see higher voltage on the battery tomorrow morning after it's charged back up.

Tommorow I will also have access to a clamp on meter. So that's good, but I was thinking. If I had some giant parasitic draw somewhere, wouldn't it have munched my battery over the last couple of days driving with a non-op alternator?