Firstly, what an excellent weblink in Tim's (Tclederman) post in this thread -it seems to have everything alternator covered off, those pictures will be worth a thousand words when I need to take my alternator to pieces!
I bought my truck with the ammeter wired, and with the needle stuck right off the end of the "charge" scale -the ammeter was correctly connected, it looks like a previous owner started the truck with a near flat battery.
The solution I am going to try in order to keep the dashboard looking standard and have a working ammeter, is to put 6 or so (low resistance) 50W resistors in parallel with each other but then with the whole parallel array wired across the terminals of the (new) ammeter, this should push 300w or near 28 amps of the charge (or discharge) through the resistor array with the rest going through the ammeter; I'll need to get a near match of resistor array resistance to the resistance of the ammeter to get a reasonable current split.
Has anyone else tried a solution like this before? I can't see any real downside except that it will make the ammeter insensitive to small charge or discharge amounts, also I'll need to put the resistors on a substantial heat sink up behind the dashboard to stop them getting cooked.
Stuart.
