Had to look just to see ... man alive the price increase!

I paid FCP $378 in Feb 2020 for a VAL-439602. The same one is $566.99 on FCP. :yikes:

For some reason, I read that as you only check your tracking one time in the year. :rofl:

My M.O. is to type out a text to someone and then wonder why they never responded. Then I discover I failed to hit "send". :rolleyes:

AM.

I have done that countless times. It's usually becusse I was interrupted by a I phone call before I hit send. I'll wonder why they didn't get back to me and go to follow up and find my fully typed text waiting for me to send


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Yeah have to parse that whole sentence to understand I prob Hecht tracking a bunch but one of those times per year I never actually ordered


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Replacement alternator
 

Back to subject of alternator. I've been having a problem when I first start the car where the tensioner shakes like crazy.

The tensioner that first showed the symptom was in fact a cheap one and I planned to replace with OE shortly but that got postponed.

Skip ahead; I bought another placeholder when I when to change the belt and noticed the knock off tensioner reached max extension so it never fully tensioned.

That said it still felt like something very of with the belt getting tugged unevenly.

Logic says if the alternator has an open winding it would stop tugging 1/3 of the time and would give me a pulse in the accessory belt.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...93005a5658.jpg

So I picked up a micro oscilloscope and did some measurement.

At idle with no loads save the headlights I was getting a crazy high spike in voltage; about 4v peak to peak.

It wasn't synced with the alternator though it was about every 10 alternator surges. My suspicion is some device is pulling a fairly high power in pulses and shutting off casing an inductive kick making it back to the B+ terminal.

When I turned on the seat and steering heaters to increase the resistive load, the peaks disappeared.

The only big inductive load I can think of is the blower motor so I'll see if I can get the oscope on that to see if it has an open winding causing a voltage spike. I'll also just turn it off.

If there's a problem somewhere I want to solve it before I replace the knock off tensioner with the OE that might mask the symptoms.

Has anybody had similar alternator/load related issues that caused pulsing on the drive belt?

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...37cf24f1a5.jpg

Here's the 4v spike. The tiny ripples are the normal .25v peak to peak alternator ripple.

The alternator ripple was about 3.2kHz. That means the spikes were about 333 Hz. That seems like a likely candidate for a missing bar on a blower commutator. Hmmmm.