Life span of Alternators

Your post reminds me of how far we've come! Use to be you could figure on doing at least one or two wheel seals a year; my truck and trailer are pushing 800K without a single seal failure. Of course a large part of those failures back then where because of improper seal installation during the last brake job. I do love me them outboard drums and their couple hours to do a brake job!

 

Rebuilders often use cheap parts and the failure rate seems to be high. I replaced mine original alternator when the odometer hit 684k and the reman lasted about 70k then failed at the worst possible moment. I had one built by someone who I trust with genuine delco parts and it lasted the rest of the truck's life - 1.1million miles.

 

When I replaced mine, new was cheaper than reman! Which reminds me I have a core to rebuild!

 

Exactly my plan.

 

The biggest killer of the Alternator is heat, running a bunch of lights that are so you look cool, or dirt build up inside the alternator.
Before anyone tells me you should not put water in an alternator, then they would never drive in the rain.
Clean battery connections, and an extra ground cable to the right frame rail, from the alternator area also helps a lot.
Using a rebuilt is just as good as new, the parts that fail are the diodes, the regulator, bearings, and brushes. 50% of the time when ordering a rebuild you get a new one anyways.
Just a thought!

 

But my alternator is on the left side, JP3.

 

My Delco Remy decided to die one cold and windy night in KS when I had to have both blowers on high speed.

Sometime around 4 am the truck died and woke me up.

Tried to crank it. Nothing. Volts way low. If I had a set of jumper cables and a spare alt under my bunk I would have been in good shape.

Had to put on all the clothes I had and get back under the covers until 7am when the shop down the road opened. It was luck that I was near a shop.

So carrying a spare does have it's benefits. Nowadays I have a generator that will charge my batteries if the alternators craps out.

 

This thread reminds me of the last time I had an alternator go out on the road, I can't remember the exact year but it was in the eighties. My alternator went out coming back out of Boston, so I pulled in to the Mass Ten Truckstop and asked one of the men at the fuel desk if there was a starter or alternator shop around. He said sure, about a mile and one half straight east on that street, and it would be on the north side of the street. I removed the alternator and started east, there was a sidewalk all the way there, it was a couple of days before Christmas, snowing really hard and the wind was blowing.When I walked in the door, they could tell by my accent that I was not from around there, so they asked me where I was from, we talked for a minute while he got the pulley changed, I had told him that I walked down from the Mass Ten and he said "Are you going to lay down in the snow and put this on?" I told him yes, and still make it home for Christmas, and he said "Hold on just a minute", walked in to a back room and came back with a brand new wooden creeper, and it had their name printed on it in big letters, "Fleet Electrical Service Worcester, Massachusetts", he said " Here, take this, don't lay in the snow and put this on, and have a Merry Christmas" So I thanked him and headed back to the truck, and when I got there I looked at the creeper and thought, no one is going to believe this, so I put the creeper in the cab and laid down in the snow to tighten the bottom bolt, headed home and hung the creeper up on the wall in the shop so that everyone that came in could read the name of the company on the creeper. It still had the paper on the pillow that they use to protect it during shipping for several years. I have sent several other men to that shop through the years since then, I wonder if they are still in business.

 

Mass 10, known and advertised as The Dump, on all night trucking radio stations, back in the day.

 

I have 1.1 mil miles, volvo 780/D13 2008 , still on orginal alternator. Last year i bought a new one, was in sale and i was thinking i'm going to need it ; i keep it in my truck, just in case, but my original doesn't want to die yet.