hairs not falling out ive been pulling it out lately!

[57sailplane]

man i am disgusted..

i bought my boy a 68 GMC. we drove it for a year or so to make sure the bugs were worked out before he turned 16. course it pulls a boat real good. lol....

this Christmas i put a killer stereo in the truck for him. it required a 100 amp alternator. the truck had already been wired for internal regulator. i have wired 10 or so systems and this was probably the cleanest one i have put in.

about a month later my boy bought a new battery cause he said the other one was dead. he doesn't no a lot about electronics. man i thought i did. so i checked out everything. i found that a exciter wire to the alternator had come loose. so i rewired the connection.

a week later truck dead again. i chased an open on the same wire. seems they just wired it to the winding on the external regulator that was now bad. so i wired it to the other side which is actually a wire to the switch. i hope everyone is following this. you can't believe how horrible this is...
well a week goes by battery dead.. check everything and its getting a full charge. i pull the negative off the battery to check for a draw and holy spark.. it seems that because of the low voltage he has blown one of the amplifiers and shorted the other one. so i disconnect both amplifiers and flip the high dollar breaker which disconnect the whole stereo from the battery. i charged the battery check for voltage i get 12.98 volts. i let it set over night and in the morning it reads 12.99 volts.. lol gained voltage...

well its been a week without the stereo wired to the system and guess what dead battery i am at the point of being so frustrated that i can't hardly stand it..

please help thanks Andrew

[kxnomore]

I'm no expert, but I've suffered similar problems. How much voltage do you have while the truck is running? If you have 14 to 15 volts, then I'd say your actual battery is bad. If you have the same voltage as stopped, then maybe your alternator is bad. Both have happened to me before.

The other thing is to check for a battery drain while the truck is turned off.
That's easy to check, and you probably have done this, but if not, put a voltmeter set up for Amps reading, and put it between the disconnected terminal and the battery cable. If you have any amp draw at all, then start looking for drains. My Horn relay was bad and was draining the battery slowly overnight.

That's pretty much all I know about electrical, so good luck! If this is a pure wiring problem, then there was a link on this site about how to create your own internal regulating alternator conversion that explained which wires to jump, etc. Maybe something happened to some of those wires or connections?

[57sailplane]

ya i checked for battery drain with a meter and letting it set and recking voltage with nothing. i had the alternator checked and they said it was good supposedly. this is the only thing i have changed other than the stereo and now that thats unhooked it almost has to be something with the alternator.. either my wiring or the alternator...

[57sailplane]

then again mayby not... i really dont no.. thanks for the reply...

[special-K]

If the alternator is truly ok,I`d rewire from scratch.I had this same problem and solved it by switching to internal reg. alt./2-wire and new battery.You`re is converted already.The point is,something needs redone in that loop.Swapping batteries is simple.I had a late-model alt. to throw at it and that solved it for me.Sounds like voltage reg. to me.(or wiring)