well im probably halfway through my rewire, been working on it late nights after work a couple hours at a time. just a few questions. the 12v swap that was done before i got the car was pretty janky so i need some advice on if i did these things right. the alternator i think i did how the directions said but its different than it was before so i want to make sure i did it right. also the starter solenoid and ballast resistor. theres one post on the solenoid that looks like its unused in the diagram but there was something hooked up to it before...like an idiot i didnt take enough pictures before i ripped all the wires out. thanks for any help. i hope im not annoying the hell out of you guys by now haha.
on the solenoid purple is ignition switch start and the black wire goes to the positive on the coil. the 10G red wire is alternator power. the big red one obviously goes to the battery and the black leading off to the left is excitor wire and the other says alt battery.
The unused terminal on your solenoid should be marked by an "I" if you connect a test light to it it should turn on and off with the key switch,I have my HEI and electric choke connected there,for a full 12 volts.With a points distributor it would go from there to the ballast resistor.
ahhh got it. i have a points distributor so one terminal on the ballast resistor goes to the ignition switch, the other has 2 wires, one to coil positive and one to the "I" terminal?
Now to clarify my comment on the ignition wire; The pink wire you see in the ballast resistor pic comes in from the ignition switch and is marked "COIL". It splits on the other side of the resistor with one going to the coil and the other going to the "I" post on the solenoid. The purple wire in the solenoid pic is marked "IGNITION" and runs back into the switch. The heavy gauge red wire with the gray fused link is marked "power" and runs back inside under the dash (I think that went to the switch as well). The lighter gauge red wire goes to the alternator.
ok awesome. my brain does better with pictures. looks like i had a couple of em wrong. so i've got an extra wire on my alternator. the big red one. that one before went straight to the battery i think so i can probably just remove that all together. i thought it was weird that they had 2 huge positive wires to the battery on there...
If you have what is known as a "one wire" alternator it is common to run a heavy cable to battery positive sometimes these will have a second wire which "excites" the internal voltage regulator(aka two wire alternator) so you don't have to Rev to 2,000 RPM to begin the charging.
I use 8 gauge wire for all my alternators (that's what comes with Powermaster 140 amo kits). It looks to me like that extra smaller red wire should not be there. The white one should be the exciter wire.
there is a white one that connects one of the black wires on the plug thats labeled exciter wire. both the black wire coming off the plug and onto the back of the alternator and the smaller red wire are labeled "alt power"
Not sure if you already solved your bulb socket issue. I rewired all of mine using new terminals. I searched forever for these and finally found them thanks to a tip from the HAMB at a place called riwire.com. Pretty cheap. Before and after...
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