Failures in Circuitry

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But now the engine won’t start. There’s no spark. Crap.

In our last update, we mounted the alternator but hadn’t yet figured out how to wire it. A little Internet sleuthing yielded some useful pages on oldfuelinjection.com. They have diagrams and photos of three generations of Ford alternators. We quickly identified our old one as a first-generation, and the junkyard-sourced replacement as a second-gen piece.

The old one had a bolt on the back to which we’d attached a beefy battery cable, but the new one used two comparatively skinny wires through a plastic connector. Our first attempt to mate those two didn’t work out so well.

So we did away with the oversized battery cable—this alternator only produces 75 amps anyway—and matched the wire sizes on the OEM connectors. Add a couple crimp connectors and voilà! Our alternator was nearly done. According to the wiring diagram on that website, the last thing to do was attach the green/red wire to a switched hot line—one that would be powered only when the ignition was on.

The coil’s hot lead sounds like a good solution here, until you snap off the stud on the coil trying to loosen the nut. That rendered our old coil useless, and our spare disappeared somewhere—perhaps into another project, perhaps into the boundless ether.

We came out alright, though: Our local parts store had one available for next to nothing. Victory was ours, just as soon as we fired up the engine and confirmed the voltage with our new in-dash volt gauge. That, too, was an upgrade, and crapcan rules have infinite allowances for driver information systems like gauges. Our old one had a failure light mounted under the hood, which wasn’t terribly useful when we were out on the track. We were excited to try out all our new accomplishments.

But the engine won’t start. There’s no spark. Crap.

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