So a few days ago while driving at highway speeds I started to notice that the torque converter would randomly unlock causing the engine to spin at a higher revolution to maintain the same speed and then drop back down.  So I took a gander at the tranny fluid and it was looking a little low and fairly dark.

I decided to go ahead and drop the pan to do a filter change while I was at it and since my family is about to head out on a lengthy road trip I opted to do the same on their ’05 Grand Caravan.  Yesterday I head out to pick up all the materials needed and while driving around I noticed the voltage beginning to dip from it’s normal 12v – 12.5v range down to around 11v-11.5v.  As the day went on, it dipped a little further and thoughts of the alternator came to mind but a couple times it would shoot back up normal.  So, at this point I wasn’t sure if the culprit was the alternator or gauge/wiring.  But on my way home from the folks last night the lights were dimmer than normal and this morning it wouldn’t start.  That pretty much cinched it up.  Time to shell out more for repairs.

So today I went ahead and ripped out the old alternator & battery then got a lift to the parts store where I picked up a new one.  Only this time instead of a stock 102A CS-130 replacement for the F-Bodies I decided to move up a little bit and grabbed a 145A AD-244 unit that usually only shows up in the larger trucks & SUVs.  The case was only slightly larger but there are several improvements.  The old style CS-130 series didn’t have any ports on the back cover for airflow and used some type of ducting system to try and move the air out, the AD-244 has a couple dozen ports on the back cover for good air flow.  Another major upgrade is that instead of stacking the positive & negative bridge rectifier diodes on top of each other they separated them out into positive & negative halves with more spacing for better heat dissipation.  I also had to remove the third bold bracket from the block as the truck alternator didn’t have a provision for it.  Fine by me since that bolt was utter hell to get to in the first place.  Once everything was cleaned up and put back in charging is back to normal and actually a little better than it was before.  Not to mention it cranks out more amps so that it won’t have to work as hard to keep the battery charged and the electronics in the car will have more juice to do their jobs.

I suspect the failure was caused by the leaking power steering reservoir which sits directly above the alternator.  I need to put rebuilding that a bit higher up on my list of items now since I don’t want to kill the new unit.

And of course it doesn’t stop there.  Yesterday the passenger window motor pretty much died and it’s quite difficult to get the window back up.  So I went ahead and picked up another motor for that and will likely be installing that tomorrow.