Preventative replacement of alternator?

[andrewwynn]

I had a refrub bosch fail on the 2nd or 3rd drive. I traded it in for a new valeo at O'Reilly auto. Came with lifetime warranty. There are O'Reilly throughout the country and alternator is a mission critical part.

I've rebuilt the valeo at about 140.000 mi. and it lasted 40-50,000. I didn't autopsy to determine the fault but it likely was other than the brushes and rings which is what i replaced.

The Valeo repair kit was only $20 at the time i would prob be comfortable with swapping in this $80 model and rebuild the current one for $30 say and have that as a spare.

It's not difficult to rebuild the VR and replace the slip rings.

The second time i rebuild one i just replaced the brushes and flipped the polarity of the slip rings since 80% of the wear was on one ring. Rather than replaced the rings i just set it to wear down the other ring basically resetting the wear clock 100,000 miles with $12 of brushes and an hour of time.

I have a thread on xo showing how to do the polarity swap. IIRC, i cut the conduction bars and soldered wires criss/cross to swap the polarity.


–awr–

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