Kirk Kohnen's Alternator Removal Seminar

snipped-for-privacy@bellsouth.net typed until their fingers bled, and came up with:

These procedures I found here say you have to go at it from above . . .

Alternator Replacement Procedure:

1. Write down all of your radio station presets (optional) 2. Disconnect negative battery cable (most assuredly NOT optional)

1. Unsnap the splash shield from the alternator.
2. Unbolt the cable running from the alternator to the starter AT THE STARTER.
3. Carefully pry the clip up from the other alternator connector and remove it from the alternator. Be careful not to break the clip off of the connector.
4. Remove the upper alternator bolt (13 mm) from above.
5. Remove the lower alternator bolt (13 mm) from below.
6. Remove alternator down through the wheel well.

You now have the alternator with a 1 ft cable attached. You need to remove this. The Chilton's manual suggests using a 13 mm wrench that is only about 60 thousands of an inch thick to hold the stud coming from the alternator (to prevent it from turning). Such wrenches are quite difficult to find. I removed the cable from the alternator by putting two 10 mm nuts on the top of the stud and tightening them against each other. Then, I used one 10 mm wrench to loosen the nut holding the cable while using another 10 mm wrench against the bottom of the two 10 mm nuts that I put at the top.

The bottom line in working without the stud coming out from the alternator is you don't want to put any torque on it with respect to the alternator. It is (ahem) not a robust design. When you get this cable off, put it on the same position on the new alternator and tighten it similarly (using something to hold the stud into the alternator to keep it from turning. Either a very thin 13 mm wrench, or the double nut trick. Then reverse steps 15 to 1 in reverse order.

If I remember right, I used a 13 mm wrench like this one:

Does that 13mm upper alternator bolt have a nut on the other end of it, like the lower one does? I keep turning it ccw and it's not loosening.

I got the Haynes manual at the public library. It's not very helpful and shows a bolt different than the combination torx stud fastening the steel tube brace which holds the top of the alternator.

Gonna conquer this thing yet, but probably would have come out better running to the dealer, which here is considered by some of us as a shakedown operation with its corporate hdq in another state.

Thanks to Kirk, Chuck and others for the honest help.

Might as well keep you posted. Sears is nearby but no sockets for those star-shaped stud ends designed to torment a shadetree mechanic. So I used a set of long pliers and padded the jaws with duct tape. Finally the accursed stud came out and the brace fell to the gravel. Now the alternator wants to move a little but is jammed tight. I carefully prized it loose from the lower bolt bosses, where it was also jammed tight, but it doesn't seem to want to come out. All the rest of Kohnen's instructions I have complied with to the letter. I hate beating or prizing on an alternator, even with a plastic deadblow or screwdriver. Back to the torture chamber, which is nothing like working on an airplane, where thank god there is usually some space, unless you're shoehorned into a grotesque contortion behind the panel. I think my days bragging on this little car are over with. It's a little short-lived American Trabant, imho. Engine purrs, though.

Well, OK, I found the upper bolt in its hiding place, which you have to come at from a quarter view towards the opposite rear of the car and facing upwards through the wheel well. I'm in a poorly lit spot with a drop light that keeps eating bulbs, which btw should be from Lowe's, i. e., those heavy-duty ones with the plastic outer capsule.

Anyways, she's out now and ready to exchange at the Saturn dealer for a two-hundred dollah reman, plus a serpent belt and some blue loctite. Strike that comment about the American Trabant. I love that lil ol DOHC engine that sips gas at $3.50 a gallon here in NC and zips around the mountains with gusto.

Yeah, next time it will take 15 minutes. Like hell. Pulling this thing reminds me of the cussing I hear in a hangar when somebody is working on a Cessna 210. You need chipmunk hands and fingers to work on one of those pigs.

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