Guys,

I have done the CS130 alternator swap as depicted in the team chevelle tech reference (did it last summer and its been great).

Ive been doing some rewiring on my 67. im about to install a stereo amp, so i want to beef up the wires. At any rate, while i wait for my heavy duty cables to come in, i did the following:

made a junction box under the left fender where my dual electric fans, a wire from my alternator positive post, a wire connected to the red wire on the horn relay and eventually my amp power wire will hook to. this junction is isolated from ground

unhooked the red 10 gauge wire from the circuit at both ends and taped it off. ran an 8 guage (temporary) wire from the battery to the above junction box.

per the chevelle tech webpage, the old white wire that went to the voltage regulator is capped off, the blue wire to the voltage regulator is tied to the brown/red wire on the alternator connector. the red wire pigtail is connected to the alternator pos terminal.

when i hook up the battery, the lighst, electric fans, heater, horn all work. however when i went to start the car (turned the key), it seems like something was shorted... the lights went real dim...

i got out, verified my wiring. i also noticed a very high pitched hum in the alternator when the battery is connected and the car is off. it goes away when i diconnect the battery. i never noticed this whine before... is it normal? is my alternator going bad?

thanks guys!

ok, well, i missed most of a car show, but i figured it out.

hopefully a lot of people doing the alternator conversion will see this.

turns out that when i tried to start the car, my alternator was shorting the 'L' wire (brown/red...that eventually makes its way to the brown 16 gauge wire on the firewall connector) to ground.

there is supposed to be a resistance in there so that its not a direct short. if you have a "dummy light" for your alternator, the bulb will act as the resistance and the bulb will light up.

i have the gauges in my car (ammeter in the console) so i dont have a dummy light, so i didnt have a resistance in the line and i was getting a direct short.

i fixed the problem by putting a 500 ohm resistor (.5 watts) in series with the brown 16 gauge wire. i did this right at my alternator pigtail. and the car starts and drives fine... well, it kinda goes sideways in first and second, but thats another problem :)

bottom line: if you are doing this internally regulated 3 wire alternator conversion and you have a dummy light, youll be fine wiring it up as the tech reference says. but if you have gauges, then you will probably need to put a resistor in series with the L wire. You can buy the pigtail with the resistor already in it.

At the time i did the conversion (a year ago), i used the non resistor pigtail and its run fine for a year. All of the sudden, i update some wiring and now i need the resistor. i guess that the old stock wires had enough resistance built in to successfully pull down the current in the L wire, but my new nicely soldered connections didnt have the resistance needed...

There is a resistance wire in the GEN lamp circuit. If I recall, it connects the ACC power and IGN power circuits together. I can only guess this is to keep the alternator excited if the bulb burns out. In any event, I suspect you were exciting your alternator with this resistance wire (brown with a white stripe) prior to the wiring upgrade.

The resistance wire connected to the ignition switch and guage pod. The brown / white wire was about 3' long and was ran inside the under-dash harness and looped back again to the guage pod to get the right length / resistance.