September, 2008:
I got the Coupe running pretty well, and drove it to the local "cruise night". On the way home the Coupe "just died".
I pulled over and played with a variety of things that I had been tinkering with recently - points, etc, etc.
Only the next day did the daylight reveal the reason the car ended up on the back of a AAA towtruck that night -
the three cables that run from the generator (within the power unit, right in front, just behind the grille) to the rectifier
(which lives hanging from the bottom of the battery tray), had melted together at a connection point in the middle,
shorting themselves out and bringing me to a stop.
Here are the three cables in question:
Here is what the wires looked like in better days:
Here are the four wires shown above, as drawn in the parts catalog:
Below is where the replaced wires live on the wiring diagram. I have drawn them in red: they are actually white.
Not shown are the connectors in the middle, which are disconnected when pulling the engine.
I am pretty sure that the "ACG" stands for A.C. Generator.
It seems the generator creates AC, and the rectifier "rectifies" it to DC.
In the process of replacing the wiring between the generator and the rectifier, I had to pull the battery and it's tray out.
It seemed like a good time for a little paint, so the battery tray got scrubbed of it's surface rust and painted in my paint shop, seen below.
I don't think it started out "body color", but what the heck.
It's amazing to me that rectifier was able to do it's job, seeing as it was covered inside and out with 1/8" of road crud.
After much scraping with a screwdriver, I removed the old cable-ends (which were connected with a crimp and a massive amount of solder)
and replaced them with fresh wiring and a heat-shrink weatherproof wrapping.
The connectors at the halfway-point to the generator got the same treatment.
Yes I know that the original wires were white and the new ones are black, but heavy gauge wires in white weren't available that day...
SO THEN the moral of the story is: Watch your wiring, especially the connections.
Clean away any corrosion, and protect connections from the elements wherever possible.
The situation described above could have been avoided if I had taken that advice.
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