Temporary Loss of Electrical Power

I’m revisiting your post to see progress & I find or more accurately don’t find a piece I wrote a few days ago regarding the EPS.
I mustn’t have pressed send & now it’s buggered off & quite rightly so, what would wait around for some old gezzer to wake up.
Anyway, I seem to recall a self preservation routine programmed into the steering ECU, which cut the system when it has had an excessive amount of tooing & frowing for its liking.
“Enough exercise for one day, thank you very much, do you know how old I am in Car Year?”
That was the gist of my now departed post.
Other additions have been more than adequately covered by Cobb’s & Co.
M

Hi everyone,

Thank you so much for your help. The TF is all fixed now with a new voltage regulator (£22 from Ebay)

This has been one of my first ever repairs on a car, and I've had the help of a neighbour who is an auto electrician (like the master teaching the young apprentice). I owe him a thank you card and a case of beer at the minimum.

I changed the voltage regulator with the alternator still attached to the car.

My top learnings are as follows:

1) DISCONNECT THE BATTERY before working around the alternator. There is a big live cable running from the battery to the nut on the alternator, and it has the potential to do serious harm.

2) You need to remove various heat shields and brackets to get to the screws and bolts on the alternator. You might need a long bar to break some of the bigger bolts.

3) For the screws on the alternator that hold the backing plate and regulator in place, I strongly recommend that you invest in a screwdriver that has a 90 degree universal joint. It's very difficult with a normal screw driver, partly because the exhaust manifold gets in the way, and partly because you'll be bent in half in an upside down U shape trying to reach in and undo the screws.

4) Check the easy bits first eg fuses visually and with a multimeter. I did plenty of googling before starting this job, and I've found threads where owners have bought and fitted a new alternator only to find that a fuse has blown.

Thanks again

Matt

Thank you Matt for reporting back & trumpeting your success & why not. If you’ve come to car fettling later in life & you’ve taken the job full square on the nose & sorted it, you’ve started to cement a relationship with the car & folk on T-bar.
There are owners who hop on, ask all the questions, to which regular contributors turn their hard won knowledge to answer. This takes our time & research & having resolved their problem, off they go, without even pressing the thank you button.
And here you are contributing a “how to” on you’re first outing.
Great stuff.
M

Its great you have cured it and even better that you have written it up for others.

You should definitely stick around !