RE: one wire alternator

["Jack W. Drews" <vinttr4@geneseo.net>]

You can buy one-wire alternators through eBay (lots of them, search 
alternators one wire) or through hot rod supply houses or even JC Whitney. 
Those outfits all sell them as suitable for race cars.

Be careful if you do find one in a local store, or even mail order. Many of 
them are rebuilts which sometimes last a long time and sometimes last only 
a year.

The Chevy one is nice because then when it goes bad (when, not if) you can 
replace it anywhere. I used those for five years with satisfactory 
reliability. I now use a Nippondenso because it's a lot smaller.

You must drill out the mounting hole and use a long 7/16" bolt to mount it 
on, and you can use a piece of steel tubing between the ears of the regular 
generator bracket. Or, you can forget about the rear ear and just use the 
front one, but then the alt wants to bend at an angle because of belt 
tension. I've made a couple of brackets of different designs to prevent 
that, one end to the alt mounting bolt and the other end to a water pump 
bolt or timing cover bolt. You'll probably have to saw a little bit off of 
the back of the mounting lug to make the belts line up.

I also put a very large pulley on mine because it is used only for high rpm 
racing. You will probably want to keep the stock pulley since you drive 
yours on the street too. Since you drive home from the races, you will have 
to get used to having reasonably bright headlights and you may miss the 
ambience of driving home to the warm yellow glow from the Lucas system. If 
you decide you want a big pulley, email me back and I'll paw through my 
receipts and find the source and part number.

You can run the one wire to the hot side of the master shutoff switch (not 
the engine side) so it is always connected to the battery. The disadvantage 
of that is that the wire is always hot, so when you touch the terminal with 
a wrench while removing the manifold, it makes a big blue flash and melts a 
nick in your wrench. The better solution is to use a master shutoff switch 
that has two terminals for the alternator wire, so when the master shutoff 
is 'off', it kills power to the alternator as well. These are not expensive 
and are available from Racers Wholesale and others.

Good luck1

At 08:38 AM 4/11/2005, you wrote:
> UJ,
> Okay. So I go over there to NAPA and ask them for a one-wire GM alternator.
> The good 'ole boy says, "What's it for?"
> I say, "Well, it's an old Triumph and all I need is for it to sorta fit."
> He says, "You can't put this in no motorcycle."
> This goes on for a couple of more minutes and I walk out with an alternator
> of some ilk in a dusty old off-the-shelf box.
> Once back in my shop I see, of course, two dangling wires that used to be
> hooked to my faithful and trusty positive-earth generator.
> The easy thing to do is take the GM alternator back to NAPA, except that
> everyone says it's so easy to hook the new-fangled thing up and have greater
> reliability, less weight and more juice.
> This next step is where I need help. Assuming that I can get the
> one-wire-model to physically mount-up straight and stout, what do I do then,
> (at a sixth grade learning level), to make it do its thing?
> Thanks,
> Richard
>
> BTW: I haven't been to the NAPA store yet. This is just a vision of what it
> will be like.
>
>
> You Wrote
>
> Several days ago someone sent me a note asking a question about one-wire
> alternators. I've lost your message in the computer. Please send me the
> message again.
>
> uncle jack