Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

One of the cause of the heavy corrosion at the #3 cyl spark plug.

It was missing the IG coil cover gasket at the rear bank.

New one installed.

Even with it, the water can enter the area so I always put used towel over the rear bank before washing the car and try driving the car regularly.









Quick detailing of the Eng bay, pre-adjusted the fluid level, final check and went out for the test driving session.

Happy with the result, re-torqued the wheel nut although not enough mileage covered so asked the owner to check the torque again on return.








With the final test driving session done, the car was nearly ready to be returned and just required washing.

On the way back, I noticed that the voltage gauge was showing way too low figure even without any electrical load at cruising speed.

It was sunny and with no A/C in use as it was pretty much empty refrigerant so disabled it any way.

There was no 'charging' warning light and the low voltage didn't change even with the increased rpm so the regulator and the rectifier seemed to be fine.

New battery just installed as in previous blog post and the volt gauge was just being calibrated so should be accurate enough.

Still, the alternator body was massively hot.










I don't have huge capacity electrical load tester so instead, used rear defogger, all main/dipped beam headlights, set blower fan at max speed to apply huge electrical current consumption.

Then, applied brake pedal to further increase the load.

This will force the system to start taking out the power from the battery as the current consumption exceeds the alternator charging performance at specific rpm.

















Can't return the car like this so after speaking to the owner, decided to open the alternator.

What I found was that there were excessive amount of wire like metal flake all over the rectifier/stator area and the regulator was covered in really thick sticky material.

I refurbished my alternator years ago and kept the used rectifier and the regulator so it was a good reference for the comparison test.