I'm almost done with my serpentine belt conversion. The only thing left is to wire up my alternator. On my old one, there is only one brown wire coming from the firewall into the plug which plugs into the alternator, and from that plug there is a little red wire that attaches to the back of the alternator, and that's it. On my new alternator there is three wires that come out of the plug, a red, brown, and tan-white. I have already connected the brown from the firewall to brown from the new alt, and the red from the new alt directly to the battery. What do i do with the tan-white wire in the new alt? I'm assuming i don't need it. And also should i hook up another wire to the back of the new alt directly to the battery? Will that work? Thanks a lot.

p.s. to make matters more confusing, the alternator is from an 88 camaro, which has four prongs in it where the plug plugs into. The plug that i got for it (cut it off at a junk yard and dont remember what year car it was) has three wires in it that i described above (red, brown, tan-white)

 

Please disregard my first post. Here is a simpler question.

The 88 alternator has provisions for four wires (B, S, F, L, - from Haynes manual). Is "S" the one that connects to the back of the alternator? If so, can i connect that wire directly to the battery or does it have to go through the starter solenoid and a fusible link like the wiring diagram says? I've already connected "B" directly to the battery, "L" to the instrument cluster, and "F" i'm gonna leave disconnected. How does that sound?

Thanks a lot,

 

Hang on, I'll post some pics of mine...

 

New 88-92 Alternator with plug:



Original 88-92 Alternator:



The farthest to the driver's side wire (big red wire in the second picture) goes to the BAT post on the alternator.

The two center wires are tied together and attach to the single wire coming from your harness.

The fourth wire (if present) is not used in this application.

 

thanks so much for clearing that up. So you don't have a wire that attaches to the battery and the alternator at all? I'm assuming you would still need a wire that attaches to the BAT post and directly to the battery, am I right?

 

Yeah, I do, I thought the question was just the wires on the connector. I have another wire running from the BAT post directly to the positive battery terminal. So the BAT post has two wires--the big red one from the plug and the wire from the battery.

 

I wired it up just like you have it. Everything runs normal. Thanks for you help.

 

One thing I've noticed is that these alternators charge poorly when they get hot... this is not just my car either. So keep an eye on the temperature gauge.

 

CS series alternators will throttle back output by design. The regulator IC incorporates a thermistor to sense unit temp. As it gets hot the duty cycle changes. You can purchase a different rear housing from www.alternatorparts.com called an iceberg. It has a finned heatsink to dissipate heat better. Believe it or not the electronic components handle the heat, however many failures are due to the rear bearing cooking. The iceberg housing helps with this problem.

 

With the new alternator, i now have an electric fan from a 96 v-8 thunderbird, stewart aluminum stage 2 water pump, and a harwood cowl hood. My engine stays really cool 160-180 F in this 90 degree weather, so i don't think i'm going to worry about my alt getting too hot. If it does i can always pick up another one at a pick-n-pull junk yard here for like $10-$15.