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ACDelco new (Chinese) alternator teardown. FAIL CHINA!
Tear down and diag on this ACDelco new Chinese built 105 Amp unit (Part number 335-1012, GM #88877222). Not much run time on it. Maybe 6 months of daily driving.
This unit also uses the Chinese sourced "Transpo CN" (the "CN" being the ISO country code for China) bridge and regulator. This is the less expensive regulator without the adjustable one-wire operation. Looked pretty scrappy though. Very poor potting job - this time unfortunately it's potted with a very rigid, almost epoxy like resin that is too hard to remove. I do not think this is the problem or at least it wasn't the driving force behind this failure.
The brush assembly wasn't squared up perpendicular to the slip ring axis:
But the actual failure appears to be that the bridge rectifier smoothing capacitor broke completely off at its unreinforced leads where they were soldered to the bridge assembly:
This is the same Chinese Transpo garbage with poor design and assembly found in the PowerMaster featured in my last tear down. All it needed was some potting or hot melt electronics adhesive to keep the little (free floating - you can see it falls about 1/8" from where it was attached) cap from vibrating and the leads failing.
Just your basic unforgivably cheap and sh1tty manufacturing.
This is specially for all you that think ACDelco is still making anything like the factory parts that came on a third gen. They just "fill out the catalog" with whatever cheap junk they can get from offshore.
The failure mode, in case anyone is wondering, was failure to regulate voltage - random and unpredictable voltage drops or spikes to below 12, or above 15. The voltage gauge was "dancing" and trending higher with climbing RPM's. This was due to the full-wave rectified DC bouncing between 0 and 12+ volts leading to the VR being completely confused and lost as to how to excite the field. Without the smoothing cap your voltage looks like this: /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ instead of: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and the surging DC (a sort of AC ripple) is a poor input to the VR and not suitable for regulating or running DC accessories.
And the war was lost for lack of a dab of hot glue.
Interesting that the Powermaster that sells for more than double the price uses the same brand components - which also suffered from very poor assembly. Clearly the Chinese school girls need remedial training at this Transpo factory. Every single part of theirs I've looked at looks like it was assembled by a pack of ADD toddlers that didn't get their morning shot of Baijiu to steady them up.
GD
Last edited by GeneralDisorder; 06-15-2019 at 04:24 PM.
Re: ACDelco new (Chinese) alternator teardown. FAIL CHINA!
My old alt was a rebuilt unit, and it was rebuilt in Indiana back in the day - 1993. Still working. I recently bought a substitute to get me by until I get time to fix the bolt that I snapped off. So I bought a remaned A/C hoping to get something similar to stock, it was a rebuilt unit, but the paint them gold rather than black. It was rebuilt in Mexico.
06-15-2019, 03:23 PM
