battery light and o2 light

[theonlyred16v@hotmail.com (Brian Haygood)]

Hey, I just went through this on my car!  I finally get to contribute useful 
info to the 'rocco list!

Al gave me a technical rundown on the problem.  I will sum up:  Alternators 
have to have a voltage running through them before they can create more 
voltage.  This is accomplished by having a permanent magnet-based generator 
element inside them that gets things going.  When this "primer" current gets 
flowing, so-to-speak, then the alternator kicks in does its job.  If the 
magnet stuff goes bad, your alt never gets going.

If the wiring is going bad this can make it harder to get the alt going (can 
you tell I don't really understand this because I use stupid terms like that 
over and over again??), and your lights stay on longer and longer.

The alt and OXS lamps are both wired up such that the OXS light comes on 
whenever the alt light is on.  This is triggered by the blue wire on the 
back of the alt, which runs near the starter, has a connector at the (+) 
battery terminal, and heads to the dash.  This wire's (alt) voltage is 
compared to the battery voltage to see if the car is charging well enough.  
Bad grounding often causes all of this.

Fix:  Clean all ends of all wires you can get to.  Clean mating surfaces of 
wires (including the little blue one, and the small wires atthe batt. 
terminals) with emory paper and/or soldering flux.  Clean the ground wire's 
connections to battery, body (behind battery (and maybe under airbox??)) and 
transmission mount (under airbox).  Also clean ends of wires at starter, 
alt, and the coil's connection to the intake manifold.  This cleaning is all 
it took for mine to run well.  Replacing these cables may provide further 
improvement, but my cables were in decent shape.

PS:  Just moved my battery to the rear yesterday, and the car starts even 
better now.  Used some trick aluminum wire that weighs only 3 lb's to get 
all the way to the front with a seriously massive cable.  I have a lot of 
this stuff left over if anyone wants to make new cables, or relocate their 
battery.  I'm bringing it to Cincy.

Brian
>From: breandan mcilwain <irisheet@yahoo.com>
>To: scirocco list <scirocco-l@scirocco.org>
>Subject: battery light and o2 light
>Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 19:15:02 -0700 (PDT)
>
>these 2 lights are staying on for a few moments when i
>fire up the car, it has never done this in the past
>and i dont understand why it is doing it now.  does
>this indicate i am having a charging problem?  i have
>a new alternator and all new belts
>
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