123quattro

All this Delco alternator talk got my 84 jealous and she wanted one too I guess. About 10 days ago my voltmeter in the cluster started reading a little eratic. Sometimes 12, sometimes 13.5ish like normal. I got a meter out and read the voltage under the hood and came up with 13.5, so no worries I thought. This went on for about a week. Last Friday it started just sitting at 12. On Monday while driving back from work, it went from 12 to 11 and lit up all the warning lights/messages in the cluster. Mind you none of this really concerned me since only on a really good day will all the gauges work in my cluster. I wrote it off as a bad ground I needed to fix, eventually. I drove it like this Tuesday and Wednesday to work (50 miles round trip). Last night I went to the parts store to pick up a pair of halfshafts for my girlfriends 04 Grand Prix. Came back out to leave and the car wouldn't start: dead battery. That had me confused, but then I finally figured out that I was an idiot, should have believed the gauge, and had been driving around ONLY on my battery for the last 2.5 days. I had a nice mile walk home and picked up her car and some cables. We jumped my car and I limped home tail between my legs while being chastised by her for my car stranding me, again. It had done this the week prior with the bad Motronic relay.

As far as installing the alternator, it was a little more work than I thought it would be. I swapped my serpentine pulley over to the new alternator since it was about 10mm smaller in diameter and I thought that would help with the low speed charging. Put the three 5/8th washers in front of the alternator on the upper mount, and then went to put the belt on. It wasn't even close to being right. The new alternator swung up into the power steering pump before it was close to taking the slack out. Back to the parts store again for a new belt. I bought three in different sizes. Turns out the one you need if you run the 928 pulley on the Delco alternator with a serpentine drive belt is a 340K5. With the belt issue squared away, the rest was straight forward. I made a pigtail to connect the excitation wire to the new setup. If you don't have the mating factory connector, which you can't buy at a parts store, all you need to do is connect to the middle of the three small pins that are off to the side of the big pin. Fired the car up and at 800 rpm I was seeing 13.5-13.8 volts consistently. It showed that all the way in to work today.

Hopefully this helps if anyone tries this on a non V belt alternator car.

Jim bailey - 928 International

Right driving a new average car is like this _____________ the 928 a bit like the Alps or the stock market of late ! When you get to feeling good just because the damn thing started , that is when you know you are hooked ! enjoy the journey.