Time for my yearly maintenance question! We now have a little over 300k miles on the brick and something finally wore out.

The alternator quit and removing the brushes revealed they were extremely short and the slip rings had extremely deep grooves so I decided I would just replace with a rebuilt alternator. When swapping pulley and fan from old to new I discovered that although there was a keyway cut into the shaft there was no key present on the old alternator.

Is this something that was "cost-reduced" out as unneeded (beancounters do stuff like that) or did the pulley installer have a really bad hangover and forget to put it in? Should I scrounge one or is it not that big of a deal?

Thanks,

Justin B.

get the nut tight and it won't be an issue. i think the beancounters started deleting them many years ago. seen it alot with original and rebuilt alts. good luck, chuck.

Yeah, that's what I figured. I worked for a major computer manufacturer in another life and the beancounters were always doing crap like that. Their logic was that if they saved a penny per machine over the course of a 100,000 units then that was real money. Unfortunately 50% of the things they decided to cost reduce came back to bite support in the a$$ and cost 10x to fix than they saved... >:-|

Oh well, I digress, I smacked the nut back on the new one with the impact and installed it. Brick is now back in the land of the living and noticed the blower motor screeching. I told the ol' lady I was NOT going to fix that so I suppose it will be for sale or going to the bone yard once she gets fed up with it. Hopefully she'll put up with it until after the end of the year and I'll get her a new truck...
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Justin B. - 1993 240