so. i'm drving my car over to my new place.. everything is fine.. i'm pumping my sub, everything is cool.. when all the sudden my entire cluster dies.. no lights, just this annoying beeping.

the car kept running and driving fine.. i have an elictric fan so i checked to see if everything was in order "belts" all was good so i kept going.. the cluster came back to life a minute after i shut off my stereo (not sure if thats relevant) so i left it off.. but then randomly died again.. beeping with no lights again.. did that all the way home.. and now when i go out to start it.. it does it for a few seconds then pops up again..

this was the first time i drove the car with the electric fan on it.. but not the first time it's been started and run..

obviously my cluster is fine.. cuz it works great when it decides to come on.

I suspect the alternator.. because my internal regulator is toast.. kicking to 16 volts randomly.. but the tach always worked fine before.

any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

bump..

 

Did you put a relay in the fan wiring?

 

the fan is operated through a toggle switch with a fused stand alone circuit.. there is a temperature sensor with variable resistance attatched in the loop, it's directly off the battery.. not anything to do with the car.

works well actually, the warmer she gets the faster the fan goes. never goes over 1/3 of the guage.

 

set up the relay to the positive on the trailing coil for a switch this way you will never forget to turn that damn switch on hehe

 

If you are still running the stock alt, it's not up to the task of the extra loads you've added Time for an upgrade.

 

doing the GM alternator swap as we speak. I think 140 amps should do the trick

 

Yup, that did it, alternator was the issue

 

Thanks for posting back and letting us know the soulution.

 

no problem

 

Yeah, it sounded familiar but I didn't get to the thread in time.

Last year my alternator belt (with less than 1,000km on it) broke. I drove the car home with similar symptoms (in my case all the dummy lights came on, and I assume it would have beeped had I not removed the oscillator).

I've got an FD alt now. 110amp, good enough for me. Though I found out recently that it doesn't provide enough power if I have my idle set too low (like 650rpms). My battery is absolutely completely totally dead, so I had to push start the car a few times, and it ran great... until I was decelerating back down to idle. If the needle went too low, the alt wasn't spinning fast enough to make enough power, so the car would die. I cracked the idle scerw up so that it idles at 850 and everything is good now.... still have to replace the batt though.

Jon

 

show pics of the alt swap

 

Pictures it is.

 

At least this bump was from the OP. Looks good.

 

2 years later though haha. it is a nice job though