Took my car to the AACA car show yesterday up in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee. Typical show... cars everywhere, people everywhere, and more "flux capacitor" jokes than should really be allowed. Anyway, I was sitting in my lawn chair at the rear of the car talking with an elderly gentleman about my car when he said, "Is there supposed to be smoke coming out of there?" I looked up and smoke was starting to pour out of the right side of the engine bay, right above the alternator. I leaned over into the engine and sniffed to see if I could tell if it was fuel or electrical. It was definitely electrical. I ran around to the passenger side of the cabin, flipped up the passengers seat and flipped off the battery cut-off switch which is installed in the battery compartment cover. The smoke stopped, but the smell and smoldering continued for a little. By now I had a decent sized crowd around my car. I really think the old Chevy and Mopar guys wanted to see a Delorean burn.
I crawled under the rear of the car and found the source of the fire. On my car, there are 6 brown wires all coming together and terminating to one bolt on the rear of the alternator.
One of the wires was bent over in such a way that it's insulation was rubbing the rear case of the alternator. I guess it eventually rubbed-thru and was shorting out on the rear of the alternator. It got hot enough where it started to melt the wires above it too. I removed the key from my battery switch and then used a flat blade screwdriver to bend the ring terminal out away from the alternator case and then wrapped the crap out of it with electrical tape. If I hadn't been right there when it happened, it probably would have caught the whole car on fire.
Drove it an hour back home after the show and everything seems to be fine. I'll clean up the wiring mess and heat-shrink everything one night this week.
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Originally Posted by bfloyd
