flickering battery light, only at LOW rpm's

Goldentour if this works out and fixes my flickering problem.. I will be permanently indebted to you. My car flickers so so so so bad. Like road signs flash at me because my lights flicker so bad. I've read everything i can on this topic, everyone says replace the alternator. Well that didn't help. I've made posts before, but no good help. I regrounded everything in the engine bay area with nice new thick cables. No help.

Sorry bout the complaining but this has been driving me up the wall. OK so as far as this fix goes.
1. Cut the red wire on the 3 wire harness.
2. Attach it to the thick alternator wire via a round cable end or something of the sort.

Is that it??
do i leave the other end of that wire attached to nothing??

You are correct.

but let me summarize:

1. cut red wire from 3 wire plug from alternator.
2. extend the red wire STILL HANGING from the connector to the main CHARGING wire.
3. the red wire going into the harness is no longer used. TAPE IT UP!!

Heres a Pic of the final wiring. The PINK wire is your new extension.

AGAIN, i cant take credit for this, and yeah i really feel for all of us who have replaced the alternator and did not see any benefit.

Originally posted by GoldenTour:
i can probably change it in 2 hours tops now. the wiring fix takes about 1 hour if you take your time and who know it might save you the money and hastle of removing and replacing.

It appears that we can do the wiring fix without removing the alternator. Correct?

correct. it may be kind of hard to remove the nut, remove the retaining clip and unlock the other small connector. it was for me at least.

once you have all the wires removed from the alternator. pull the harness up above the engine right above the alternator, next to the coil pack, do your modifications there and then feed the wires back down and put everything back. if you have large hands it might be tough but YOU DO NOT NEED TO REMOVE THE ALTERNATOR! just take your time.

Originally posted by GoldenTour:
correct. .....
if you have large hands it might be tough but YOU DO NOT NEED TO REMOVE THE ALTERNATOR! just take your time.

I have small hands. So, I guess I am golden then. No, you are Golden(Tour).

Thanks again.

definately thanks again. I will be trying the fix this week. I will keep everyone posted

maybe you can also take some good pics. so we can come up with a simple HOW-To. i think its something that should be posted. what do you guys think? who wants to write it up?

Originally posted by GoldenTour:
who wants to write it up?

Ray

Originally posted by Ray:

Originally posted by GoldenTour:
who wants to write it up?

Ray

YOU!! i should have figured you would want to. you just want to be cast in gold, huh there Almighty.

hahaha!

You guys never cease to amaze me. (or make me chuckle)

I don't mind writing it up, though to be honest its much easier to do it if you actually performed the task. The writeup is only as concise as the planning during the task (missing pictures, steps, or tool sizes makes it less than effective)

So.. I will write it up, but only if I have that information (at which point, they'll have alredy done THAT much work, they may as well write it up, too!)

Anyway... If someone just has an absolute disgust for writing things, then I will write it, otherwise it would likely be a better how-to if they wrote it themselves.

Ray

Originally posted by Ray:
hahaha!

You guys never cease to amaze me. (or make me chuckle)
.....
Ray

Once again, all hail Ray The Almighty!

So, being lazy, I'm trying to think this through before I actually do any work

I have a flickering battery light, but I have no other symptoms. I mean the car runs perfect, my lights dont dim, instrumentation is all accurate and normal. Only symptom I have anything wrong is a flickering light. Is there some voltages I should be checking first before I go about rewiring stuff? Or is that besides the point for me?

If it comes down to it, and I have to rewire this sucker, I could take some good pics and write-up a how-to (kind of ironic after posting how lazy I was huh?)

Originally posted by rkneeshaw3.0:
Is there some voltages I should be checking first before I go about rewiring stuff?

Test the charge on the battery. Engine off, turn on lights for one minute (should be 12 volts or slightly more).

Test for alternator, car running, voltage should be 14 to 14.5 volts

I'd do a how to but the i lost the POS digital camera i had.

Originally posted by GoldenTour:
You are correct.

but let me summarize:

1. cut red wire from 3 wire plug from alternator.
2. extend the red wire STILL HANGING from the connector to the main CHARGING wire.
3. the red wire going into the harness is no longer used. TAPE IT UP!!

Heres a Pic of the final wiring. The PINK wire is your new extension.

AGAIN, i cant take credit for this, and yeah i really feel for all of us who have replaced the alternator and did not see any benefit.

I'm gonna have to try this!

EDIT: Will this cause the battery light to stay on all the time, or does it still sense that the battery is charging?

OK im sorry i keep putting in bits and pieces of info in different posts.

From TSB Summary:
"
Should a customer express concern about flickering headlamps, wavering illumination of the instrument cluster, interior lighting and audio unit at low ambient temperatures when starting and at idle in the first few minutes after starting the engine, the probable cause is an extremely high resistance in the battery wiring harness from the central junction box (CJB) in the engine compartment to the B+ terminal on the generator. To rectify the concern, an additional generator/battery cable should be installed."

From what i understand from reading other posts, the lead that you cut is the REFERENCE VOLTAGE wire used by the Voltage regulator on the Alternator to regulate voltage output of the alternator itself. So, if the REFERENCE VOLTAGE wire within the harness is at an extremely high resistance, this would cause the alternator output to oscillate, thus causing flickering. follow me? so our new wire is basically taking a shortcut, instead of going through the junction box under the fuse box.

the battery light will NOT stay on! i should have taken pics when i did it. i thought everyone knew about since it had been posted here before. maybe it was a really old post i read, the post on NECO is from 9/03.

let me know if you have other q's

MOD: Maybe this thread should be a sticky.

so did u guys try this yet?

I haven't, my problems have magicly gone away

I don't mean to resurrect old threads, but the link to the fix is giving me a 404. anyone have a working link or copy of the full procedure, or does the picture pretty much tell-all

Originally posted by platinum_drew:
.. anyone have a working link or copy of the full procedure, or does the picture pretty much tell-all

Drew,
I read the link previously and this summary by GoldenTour tells it all. Test the megafuse first (and check the baterry terminals and wire from positive to alternator and negative to ground "before attempting surgery").

Originally posted by rkneeshaw3.0:
I haven't, my problems have magicly gone away

mine cured itself.. but the other night it did it for the first time in well over a month

so how do u know if the alt is shot or u just need to do this wiring setup. wont this just help with flickering lights by running an additional thicker gauge wire from alt to bat. if bat light keeps coming on and battery is fine then the alt likely has to be replaced, no?

Originally posted by Stylin55_oh:

Originally posted by rkneeshaw3.0:
I haven't, my problems have magicly gone away

mine cured itself.. but the other night it did it for the first time in well over a month

Mine did the same thing, but it took about 3 months to come back. Went away again though after about a week

Originally posted by hmouta:
so how do u know if the alt is shot or u just need to do this wiring setup. wont this just help with flickering lights by running an additional thicker gauge wire from alt to bat. if bat light keeps coming on and battery is fine then the alt likely has to be replaced, no?

you can run thicker gauge wire from the alt to the power distribution box and then back to the alt, but this fix is coming from a FORD TSB, click on the first link that i posted in this thread.
to find out if your alt needs replacing, then search for the alt test.

Originally posted by rkneeshaw3.0:
Did a search and turned up a large number of posts about a battery light at HIGH rpm's being an alternator problem. I've had a hunch my problem is also the alternator but its a bit different than all these other posts. And the weirdest part is, it seemed to go away today.

Anyway: Drove 4hrs home from the end of summer bash we had in SE MI on a beautiful sunny day, and once I got off the freeway and my RPM's lowered down to about 2500 (were steady at ~3250 or so on the freeway at 80 mph) my battery light was coming on. Punch the throttle and it goes away. Let the RPM's drop or car idle it would come back. Since Sunday and these initial symptoms, its been coming on less and less, but when it does its when the RPM's are droppping or almost idle. But today, I didnt get the light at all yet.

Here's my last log entry for an alternator:

2/7/03 100,500 Miles

Replaced Alternator and Tensioner Pulley

Mileage on the car is at 151,000 now.

What do you all think about this wierdness? Maybe I should replace the alternator anyway?

Any reason to quote the original poster and nothing else?