I just wanted to enlighten everyone on an issue I just spent a week chasing on my 96 vert GT...
I did some suspension work and then all the sudden my alternator stopped charging...didn't make any sense to me...
So, I went through 6 alternators, put in a new battery, replaced both terminals, and checked every single fuse, even the fusible link wires at the fuse box...
Well, I finally narrowed it down to it being my gauge cluster, as I heard there is a 510 ohm resistor that has been known to go bad on rare occasion. ..well I pulled my cluster and this is what I found...
If you can see, one of the lines is burnt...not sure how it happened, but that line is the one that goes out to the green/red wire on the alternator, which is actually a signal wire to tell the alternator to turn on and charge the car, its not just to tell the battery gauge what the level of charge is, it's actually vital in whether or not the alternator will charge the vehicle...Here's a diagram...
So, to fix this, I called around to so many different places to find copper tape, and no one had any...well I noticed online a lot of people selling copper tape were using it for stained glass...so I called Hobby lobby and the had foil tape, which was copper...
So for $9.51 total, I bought a 56' roll of copper foil tape and an exacto knife...I then cut a small line of the tape and re-ran the connection, snaking it around like the original line, and low and behold, my car began to charge...
Just thought I would share my experience so that in the future, maybe this can help someone troublshoot their issue and get their car running again...
I did some suspension work and then all the sudden my alternator stopped charging...didn't make any sense to me...
So, I went through 6 alternators, put in a new battery, replaced both terminals, and checked every single fuse, even the fusible link wires at the fuse box...
Well, I finally narrowed it down to it being my gauge cluster, as I heard there is a 510 ohm resistor that has been known to go bad on rare occasion. ..well I pulled my cluster and this is what I found...
If you can see, one of the lines is burnt...not sure how it happened, but that line is the one that goes out to the green/red wire on the alternator, which is actually a signal wire to tell the alternator to turn on and charge the car, its not just to tell the battery gauge what the level of charge is, it's actually vital in whether or not the alternator will charge the vehicle...Here's a diagram...
So, to fix this, I called around to so many different places to find copper tape, and no one had any...well I noticed online a lot of people selling copper tape were using it for stained glass...so I called Hobby lobby and the had foil tape, which was copper...
So for $9.51 total, I bought a 56' roll of copper foil tape and an exacto knife...I then cut a small line of the tape and re-ran the connection, snaking it around like the original line, and low and behold, my car began to charge...
Just thought I would share my experience so that in the future, maybe this can help someone troublshoot their issue and get their car running again...