that electrical resistor thinggy...

[Bubbleguinea]

bolted to the alternator, and connected to the + cable is a small resistor thing. im wondering. does this need to be on the car? i took mine off, cause i recrimped the wire, and my car has been EATING napa alternators...ive tried boshc and raylock. ive been told only get a Nissan Oem one. ive switched to an internal one, so im running a ZX. my light fuse (parking) also gets hellishly hot, and my volt meter drops a lot when lights turned on (grounds all OK)

so im going to replace the fuse box, cause i think thats the problem. but i want to find out what this resistor thing is. anybody have an FSM or something?

[montoya_fan01]

need a picture. its probably a noise supressor (capacitor), but hard to tell from a description like "small resistor thingy".

does it look like any of these?

http://www.williamson-labs.com/resistors.htm

[Bubbleguinea]

no no....not like one of those...but its hooked to the back your alternator..

[montoya_fan01]

not MY alt; YOUR alt.

http://www.autoshop101.com/forms/h3.pdf

see page 7 left side 'Paper and Foil type" capacitors. Is that like it???

[TomoHawk]

The noise suppressors are usually a small aluminum/chrome (shiney) can with a tab that's bolted to the alternator or whatever. You might have one on the ignition coil.

If it's a resistor, it'll look like a small firebrick with a wire lead out each end.

[jszarecki]

so is the noise supressor nessesary? i haev one as well, and its wire is kinds messed up

[Walter Moore]

Noise suppressors are intended to keep the spark plug arcs and to a smaller extent alternator pulses out of your radio. If you remove them, and don't start hearing pops and buzzing in your speakers you didn't need them...

But if you get ignition noise in the radio you do.

[SteveJ]

bolted to the alternator, and connected to the + cable is a small resistor thing. im wondering. does this need to be on the car? i took mine off, cause i recrimped the wire, and my car has been EATING napa alternators...ive tried boshc and raylock. ive been told only get a Nissan Oem one. ive switched to an internal one, so im running a ZX. my light fuse (parking) also gets hellishly hot, and my volt meter drops a lot when lights turned on (grounds all OK)

so im going to replace the fuse box, cause i think thats the problem. but i want to find out what this resistor thing is. anybody have an FSM or something?

Bubbles, I'm sure you could be a little more vague if you tried. As you can tell, "resistor thingy" isn't a very good description of the component. It could be a capacitor or a diode that was connected to your alternator. If you give a good description (or better yet, post a picture), maybe we could say for sure what it is.

Now, for your other problems, if you are running an internally regulated alternator on a 77 or older, you need to jumper out the voltage regulator. An overvoltage situation can give you a lot of headaches.

[bpilati]

"thingy", sound like my 14 yo son. It drives me up the wall.