Cars Alternator Mounting Bolt Broke Try This Quick Fix

What is going on with this? People do the weirdest things. Guess I'm gonna have to figure that out.

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So I'm working on this 1994 Chevy K1500. You've probably seen it in a couple of the videos at this point. And what I noticed is somebody had a plow pump on this thing. They made a little bracket. I don't know what they had going on here, but it's supposed to have a bolt that comes through from the front all the way through, and then tightens up right along here. That's gonna help make sure that the alternator stays in place where it needs to be. But for some reason, it looks like it's missing a little something. Now, for this bolt, it's supposed to have a bolt that comes through from the front all the way straight through this bracket, through the alternator, and then back through the other side. There should be a nut on the backside. Once you tighten it up, it's gonna squeeze this little coupler here and hold it in nice and tight.

Now where this is broken, where it looks like there's at least something that goes all the way down at least this deep where there's no bolt, I wanna go ahead and take this all completely out of here so I can analyze the situation thoroughly. With that said, I'm gonna be disconnecting some electrical wires, and these might potentially have some power going through them. So I'm gonna go ahead and disconnect the negative battery terminal, and then we'll start disconnecting the wires, and start removing the belt, and then removing our mounting bolts.

Oh yeah. Broke right off. Great. Let's get the alternator out of here. And now we can inspect the hole on the alternator where that bolt was going through. You wanna look inside there, see if it looks like it's damaged, covered in debris, or there's any other reason why the bolt might've been broken off in there. This one looks like it's fairly good. I just have to clean it out a little bit. Once you've inspected the holes and you know that they're good enough, of course, you're gonna make sure you want to clean them out, but there's something else that we need to think about. We went ahead and we took out that big, old broken stud out of there. I can't go ahead and reuse that, so I'm gonna need to find myself another bolt.

There's too much crap in here. All right. I know I need a long bolt. Nah. No. Wait a minute. Ooh. Let's try this. Now, this looks like it might work. Let's see. Ooh. That goes through perfectly. And as you can tell, I've got plenty of space right here. At this point, I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that I've got it going through the alternator, it fits through that as well. And then, of course, we'll find some nuts that fit on this, and then we'll trim it to the size we need. I'm gonna find some nuts in here somewhere. Okay. So I found three nuts here. And what I noticed is I have two nuts that are the same and they're pretty much basic nuts. This one right here is actually a locking nut. You can see the plastic or neoprene locker inside there. That tells me that I don't necessarily need to double nut this side, but the other side that has just these regular nuts, I will double nut these. The reason why that is, is because I don't want them to vibrate loose.

All right. So we found the hardware that we're gonna use to go ahead and put this back together. But before we can put in the alternator, you're gonna look at this area right here. This is called a little crush collar, essentially what we need to do, go ahead and spray this with some penetrant and we're gonna drive it away from where the alternator's gonna be sitting in here. After we go ahead and put in the alternator and, of course, our threaded rod, when we start tightening it, it's gonna push this collar up against the alternator and hold it nice and tight for us. All right. So now what I wanna do is take my nice, threaded rod right here. For one side, because I don't have a nice bolt head on there, I'm gonna make sure that I double nut this side. Essentially, what that's gonna do is I'll screw the first one on and then I'm gonna bring the second one and I'm gonna tighten it right up against that. Make sure you leave a couple of threads hanging off the other side there, and then we'll just go ahead and snug these up real quick.

So now we're gonna prepare our threaded rod so that way there, we can get ready for our install. What I wanna do on one side is double-nut it. So I'm just gonna take these two nuts and I'm gonna bring them together, just like this. And then I'll take some wrenches, and I'm gonna go ahead and tighten them up right up against each other. That's essentially gonna jam them in together and lock them onto my threaded rod. The reason why I'm doing that is because I don't have a nice bolt head on this right here. I have to kind of create one of my own and I don't necessarily have a welder that's at hand. So I'll just do it this way. Once we have those tight, I'll, of course, put a nice washer on the backside there, and then we can slide it through and measure. All right. I've got a couple of threads on there. Hold this side.

Nice and tight. Let's take our washer, slide it on there. Now let's go ahead and take our apparatus. We're gonna slide it right through here. And essentially what we wanna do at this point is just take a rough measurement. What we wanna do is cut off any excess that we have on this. This is the area where the alternator's gonna be sitting. So you don't necessarily have to worry about the alternator so much, but what you wanna pay attention to on this side right here is that we're gonna have a washer and a nut. So you wanna make sure that you have plenty of slack coming off of there, and then give yourself a little bit extra, but you don't want too much where it's gonna hit up against anything. All right. We've got this trimmed. I'm just gonna use a little bit of red thread locker because that's how I roll. Go ahead and slide this right through here. I'm gonna set this down, get a washer on there. Let's go ahead and start this side in a little bit. Now we're gonna tighten up the other side.

You're gonna notice as I tighten this, this bushing right here should start pressing directly against the alternator. Snug this side. All right. Let's grab our torque specs. Okay. That looks good. Just double-check my belt here. Awesome. Okay. We got everything put back together, it looks really good. I feel as though this is gonna be safe. I'm gonna go ahead and start it up. We just wanna make sure after we start it, nothing's vibrating around, the alternator's definitely not loose in any way. And then, of course, what you'd wanna do is take it for a road test.

All right, friends, so I was stuck in the middle of working on this thing. I already had it torn apart when I saw that there was a bolt that was broken in here. What am I gonna do? I can't go ahead and jump inside the truck and drive out to my local hardware store and try to find myself a new bolt. Obviously, the best fix for this would be to get myself a brand new bolt, a new nut, and, of course, put it together that way. But if you don't have access to one, maybe you have some miscellaneous things laying around, like some of that threaded rod, like I showed you, that's gonna come in handy, a couple of miscellaneous nuts that fit on there perfectly. As you can tell, this worked out perfectly. I feel confident driving it down the road.

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What were you doing?

Just listening to random music while I wait on hold trying to order a bolt. Great. What do you mean you don't know what I mean? I'm talking about the bolt that goes through the bracket to the alternator. I don't know. Probably 4 inches long, thread pitch. Yeah. Let me get you the thread pitch.