A couple days ago, the battery warning light on Megan’s trusty 1990 Honda Accord came on.  The car was due for an oil change anyway, so we just brought it in to the mechanic to see what was wrong.  Answer: bad alternator.  I’ve never done any of my own car maintenance before (not even changing the oil!), but I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with mechanical stuff, and somehow, I got the idea in my head that maybe I could replace the alternator!  The repair wasn’t going to be especially cheap (esp. considering the age of Megan’s car – we’re just trying to keep it running as long as we can at this point, without dumping too much cash into it), so after doing some research on the web, I told the mechanic that I was going to fix it myself.  I felt a little guilty about it, because we really like our mechanic, and he does good work, but he was very gracious, and even called the auto parts store around the corner for me to make sure they had the part I needed.  (Incidentally, I learned something interesting about how pricing works for car parts.  They will list the price of a part as say, $100, with a $50 “core charge”.  What this actually means is that the part costs $150, but if you bring your old one back after you replace it, they’ll refund you $50.  This appears to be relatively standard practice, for everything from alternators to engines.)

Megan is out of town visiting her family for the weekend, so I had a perfect opportunity to attempt the repair yesterday.  I kept my cellphone camera on hand to document the experience, for better or worse (apologies for the correspondingly poor quality of the photos).  Here’s what things looked like under the hood when I started out:

The alternator is in the green circle.  The steering pump (in the red circle) is unfortunately in the way.  Here’s a close-up of the alternator:

The basic process seemed pretty straightforward:

1. Disconnect the battery
2. Remove the steering pump
3. Remove the old alternator
4. Install the new alternator
5. Re-install the steering pump
6. Re-connect the battery

It turns out the tricky part was that the engine compartment of a car is a cramped little space, and sometimes something as simple as unscrewing a bolt was impossible without removing something else that was in the way (unless you’re a professional mechanic with all kinds of fancy and specialized tools).  In the end, to get at the alternator, I had to remove:

• The brake actuator (I think?  It’s the canister with the wire coming out of it in the upper-right of the first picture.)
• The steering pump
• One of the radiator fans
• The plastic guard under the front of the engine compartment (because I kept dropping stuff down there and couldn’t get it out :P)

By the time I got everything dismantled and removed the old alternator, I had quite the collection of nuts and bolts, and was beginning to regret not taking better notes about where each of them had come from…  Here’s what things looked like after I got the alternator out (it’s sitting on the car frame in the foreground):

Well, so far, so good.  Putting things back together is often easier than taking them apart, because now you know how they’re put together on the inside.  Case in point: the alternator and the steering pump had special screws that allowed you to adjust the belt tension to facilitate removing them, but I couldn’t see this part of the assembly, and basically just had to feel around and remove bolts until the parts came free.  The devil is in the details though, and if you didn’t pay close enough attention to how things were when you took them apart, you can get into trouble pretty quick trying to put them back.  I crossed my fingers, and started putting things back together (beginning with installing the new alternator of course).  I was relieved when I finished that I didn’t have any screws leftover, which is the tell-tale sign of a botched re-assembly.  Here’s the “after” picture of the engine compartment:

I held my breath, and turned the key… the car started!  I let it run for several minutes, and took it for a test drive, and everything seems to be working fine.  I’m going to drive Megan’s car the rest of the time she’s away just in case something goes wrong, but I think at this point, I’m declaring the operation a success. :)