Charging Battery with Alternator - Warning
So if you leave your lights on in a parking lot and comeback to find a dead battery you are supposed to use someone else's alternator to recharge your battery and cook theirs?????
Yes, well kind of.
My guess, based on the location of the tag and the first sentance is they were most concerned with someone who had really run the battery way down.
A few hours in the parking lot is bad, cause its too low to turn over the engine, but maybe not as the worst cases.
Not that I would have ever done such a thing. :rolleyes:
OK. So I did, and we had no charger even back at our base and that was a good 20 minute drive away. After getting the jump start, I had to baby the throttle to keep the charge rate down. I coasted where ever possible in neutral, kept in in 3rd and lowest rpms as possible. It would take hardly any effort for the charge rate to go over 20 amps. Turning the lights on helped keep some load off the charge circuit as long as I could keep the rpms down. But it also meant more load on the stator. So I wasn't helping the alternator by doing that. However the battery and the charge wires were my big concern, and for good reason.
It may be entirely coincidental that a year later that alternator gave out. It happens that today I was checking through my stack of alternators to see what was wrong with them. I assumed the one mentioned above had a bad diode. It turns out one of the stator leads showed an open winding. Hmmm.
Maybe just a cheap rewinding or replacement stator but maybe not the whole story.
That's how I stumbled across that e-bay ad. I was looking for photos of 37 to 60 amp squarebacks. The parts book shows 65 amp units had a different housing and I wanted to verify which one mine is if I could.