Hi, My wife called me from a road trip she's on in our '00 Expedition 5.4L, saying the Battery light was occasionally coming on (she was pulling a trailer up some mountain passes, so I know the Expy's working). I told her it might be the alternator, but I recently put an aux. battery in her trailer and thought that could be doing something...

Like a good forum member, I did some searches and sure enough, I find that the early signs of alternator failure are a flickering light at higher RPMs. I've seen a number of posts about replacing alternators to fix this, and one post from Bdox mentioning just replacing the brushes....

Our Expy only has 43k miles on it, would alternator brushes go that early? Or could it be the regulator and maybe I should just replace the whole unit? If you'd recommend brushes, is it easy to do and where do you get them from? (I've done brushes on drills and whatnot...)

Thank you in advance...

 

It could be as simple as a loose connection on the alternator. It could be as complicated as an intermittent down inside the alternator windings. Being intermittent, it may be hard to find.

This as close as I could come to possibly matching the alternator you have. I do not know how hard it is to change the brushes in the later alternators.

http://www.autozone.com/servlet/UiBr...3d800b8cfd.jsp

 

Thanks, Franklin2 -- she's supposed to be home Sunday and hopefully the Alternator keeps making power until then -- We head out on another trip Sunday night (time to go get our new SuperDuty ), so I'll look into a new Alternator and just replace it proactively when we get back in a week.

Thanks again for your help...