Dead battery. No biggie. Got a jump box and cables. Pop the hood and jump it fires right up. Unhook the cable and she dies hmm... Check alt, plug wire totally melted. Try to up plug connector and both charge plugs from the alt break off.
Now I'm usually pretty well prepared. I even had spade connectors. Figures I was just gonna splice in a new spade connector so the battery would charge and then drive home.
The joys of daily driving a 30+ year old car I guess. Worst part, my work is 70 miles from the nearest town. 35 from cell service. So I use the gaurd shack phone and call the girl friend who's just getting off work.
Think I'm just gonna hook up the jumper cables till the battery is charged up then try to drive it back to the freeway. Then I can run home and grab a spare Alt off my 88 xr7 and try to get it home.
You really are prepared!
What do you think caused the terminals to get that hot? Something shorted?
3G swap it with a 95 amp 3.0 Aerostar alternator when you get the chance. Eliminate that 2G.
I actually have a 3g from my 86 cougar. What's even funnier, I thought about putting it in when I got done with my head gasket a few weeks ago (busted head bolt, don't even get me started on that one.) But I decided I did enough work on the car that weekend.
Yeah, that was a big problem for Ford. If I remember right, back in the day they had a replacement connector that "fixed" the problem. You'd cut off the old one like 3 inches back, and solder the new style one on, which had heaver gauge wires going into it and a more heat resistant type of plastic. Definitely a band-aid fix and I'm sure it's impossible to find now. But a 3G would fix so many problems.
3g alt is a cheap good upgrade definitely recommend. ended up getting a new lifetime warranty one from my work for just $60
Would not surprise me if the regulator stuck wide open and the battery got overcharged and died a miserable death as well. Haystack will let us know the carnage report.
Just to echo what everyone else is saying, now is the time to do a 3G.
Plenty of car fires have happened from this same issue.
So long story short, I grabbed the alt and a few inches if the alt plug from my 88xr7 then went to swap it all in, fully expecting the plug to be charred and melted. It wasn't.
The inside of the alt was full if burnt black . I literally just swapped the alt over, pulled the burnt Alt pins out of the connector and plugged it in. Afterword I was so pissed I just hucked the alt over next to a burnt up car in the dirt next to the freeway where I parked the car to work on it.
It was not the wiring, but something internal in the alt. Cut the alt plug off my car for no reason.
Then driving it home, the fan clutch failled and started vibrating rediculously bad. By the time I got off the highway (80 mph speed limit 13 miles between exits) it chewed three ribs off the belt and took a chunk out of the fan shroud.
Pulling over again, I removed the fan and cut all the long broken rubber strings off of the belt then drove it home.
Swapped the fan off my 88 Xr7 and got a new belt at AutoZone.
Then a few days later, I hit a pothole and had the most un satisfying thunk and metal on metal.
The ball joint came out. The $55 dollar lifetime warranty ball joint I put in past December. Get a new balljoint and the press, tear everything apart and the balljoint is oval, not round. It falls out of the a arm and the new one has zero resistance.
shiznitty $55 balljoint ruined my a-arm... Or maybe the 30 year old metal was just too worn out, either way.
So now I am going to order all new front end stuff, hopefully new rubber bushings and hopefully rebuild it all.
This whole daily driving a 30 year old $500 car is starting to get a bit annoying.
Dude, what a bad run of luck! I guess it's a good idea to keep a donor car at all times. Yeah, at some point you may want to let it go into semi-retirement. I'm all about using a car up til it's got nothing left to give, but I guess there is a point where the money saved up front starts catching up with you. I've got an '86 Cougar (to be on the road soon, I hope), an '01 Expedition, an '02 Focus, '03 Ram 1500, and an '05 Mountaineer. I just calculated it; that comes to an average of 19.6 years old for my vehicles. And the Cougar has by far the lowest miles. Expy and Mountaineer are both 200k+. Ram and Focus are each in the 170k range. Cougar has 119k. Good luck!
I don't think I've ever had a fan clutch fail to the point where it vibrated, so that's a new one.
It happens. Had a customer bring an 87 Xr7 over for engine vibration that she said was shaking the steering wheel badly. She was about 18 miles away, I told her to tow it in because I was afraid it might be harmonic balancer. If its slipped bad enough to nearly falling off, it can ruin the crankshaft, not worth risk to drive it.
Once off the flatbed, I checked the balancer out and it looked nearly new like it had been recently replaced. But the clutch fan was so wobbly I dont think it would have gone another mile much less 18 without hurling itself thru the shroud, or radiator, or both. Installed new, engine revved smooth as glass.
That's a lot of wrenching on a Daily Driver, .
Huh. Never seen that one in person. Clutch was probably factory original.
For some reason when they fail, they seem to act like a ball and socket. The one I just pulled off was acting like the center hub was mounted to a row of springs. You could push it down and it would bounce back up.
Usually when they fail, its all at once. I blew apart the fan shroud and fan on my 86 around 310k miles downshifting to merge on the freeway, and it didn't put a single ding in the radiator. Just had a super wobbly metal shaft sticking out of the water pump with broken plastic everywhere when I popped the hood.
I've experienced....most of this in the last couple of years.
My co-worker is about to buy Smittybuilt stainless steel hinges for $400 for his 2012 Jeep because the one door was almost frozen shut due to lack of use. I really don't know what's worse. These old pieces of shiznit or the new pieces of shiznit :rollin: :tard: :tard: :tard:
Watch out for waterpumps....maybe redundant but my daily 87 Grand Marquis snapped a brand new Gates water pump shaft when I stood on the limiter pissed off one night over who knows what. Steel fan so it took out the shroud, radiator...tranny lines....shaft was at least an 1/8" thinner than factory. Bought a GENERAL MOTORS AC DELCO water pump, that thing is beefy!!!! I have no worries.
How sad is that? God Bless you GM :rollin:
Wanna hear the worst part? Holy cheap swapping springs sucks and is super scary on these cars.
When I was in auto shop in high school there was a kid working in the stuts he just pulled out of his car. He was sitting right next to me, took of the top of the strut mount and it popped him into the chest and knocked him flat on the ground. He ended up in the back of an ambulance, teacher said that he was trying to out lowering springs on his Honda and heard he didn't need a spring compressor.
Ever since then, I've been a bit gun shy whenever I'm around springs.
So I pulled the a-arm off my 86 cougar. Wasn't too bad, after unhooking the strut and swinging the spindle out of the way, I pryed it a bit with a shovel and it fell out, in two peices. Thought, wow that was easy, I wonder why everyone makes such a big deal of this.
Went over to do the same thing to my 86 tbird, unhook the spindle, let the a arm down to the ground. The spring is bowed out quite a bit and won't come out at all, obviously still under a ton of tension. So I jack it back up till its about to lift off the back stand, grab two beefy ratchet straps and wrap them around the spring, tighten them a bit and then do the same thing again.
I think I spent 3 hours trying to work up the courage to actually get the spring out. Then once it was out, I felt like it was a hand grenade ready to go off. Swap out the a-arm and go to out it back in, and even with the ratchet strap fully compressed and the spring almost touching every coil, still can't get it in. So chickened out and then went to get a spring compressor.
I needed up trying three different spring compressors before I got one that really worked, they were all to big to fit between the coils, even after I loosened the ratchet straps and removed them.
Ill bet I spent 4 hours trying to get the spring compressor out, after I finally got it lined up right and everything in place. Have to use an open ended wrench to loosen all 9" of the threads showing still on the spring compressor before it loosened up. Then I spent about an hour trying to take the thing apart and get it out and in between the coils.
She. I went to put the busted a-arm back on my 86 parts car, I bitterly cut about 3 coils off the already broken spring just so I didn't have to mess with that stupid tool again.
Then right as I get that done, remeber that wobbly fan clutch? I dunno if it was the two years of driving with a blown head gasket or the fan clutch that did it in, but I go to take the car on a test drive, and it hucks the serpentine belt. The brand new barely driven 5 miles serpentine belt. Pull over and pop the hood and the fan is sitting in the shroud with the entire water pump shaft bouncing up and down on the harmonic balancer.
So I swap out the water pump for the 3rd, maybe 4th time in the last two years, and its leaking, badly. I did kinda rush stuff, I used rtv on the long water pump bolts, but I didn't clean them off.
So after working a few more days and getting picked up and dropped off at work, I finally have enough time to redo the eater pump bolts. This time I took my time, wire wheeled off each on and cleaned up the entire bolt, then I put a bunch of thread sealant on each bolt, along with a touch of rtv along the shaft of the bolt just for good luck.
Now for the first time in 2 years and 85k miles, I have a daily driver that doesn't overheat or shoot coolant out overnight, even in 105°f heat. I love this car again. But not do I feel like I've been working too hard on it.
The front coil springs are crushed into a horribly small circular range of motion with the control arm.
What I've found best is to get two thick metal plates, drill a hole through the middle, use the hole in the top of the spring bucket to clamp these together with a nut and bolt or threaded rod etc...hold the top of the spring to the bucket, then get a long bar, ideally a piece of square or circle tube stock and cut notches in it so that it will actually stay in place and "grab" a lower coil, then you can bend it right into place as you support the arm with a floor jack underneath. Suddenly it's the easiest job ever.
F most spring compressors for these cars.