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Hey friends, it's Lenny here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2001 Ford Focus and I want to show you how to replace the alternator. It's going to be a fairly easy job and I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
Okay, so one of the first things we want to do after we open the hood is we're going to disconnect the battery. Here. We're going to disconnect the negative battery terminal, which is the ground. You want to make sure if you have a stereo in there that has a security system, you know what your code is. You're going to have to reset all your presets and all that, so it is what it is. Just a heads up. The reason why we're removing the negative and not the positive is because if we're undoing the negative and we happen to touch on something that's grounded, it's going to short out and it could cause a pulse through your electrical system and mess up your computer in there, PCM or ECM or anything. Blow a fuse. Best case scenario, blow a fuse.
Okay, so we've got this so it can't pop up and hit up against there. Now we're clear to move on to the next step. Okay, so we're going to use a 10 millimeter. Get this one out. I'm going to use my socket. We don't have to disconnect the cooling hoses. We just need to move this stuff out of the way. I'll show you what that screw looks like in one second. That's what it looks like, nice and rusted. Set it aside for later. Sometimes you can just lift up on this. Other times you need to pull a tab. This one just comes right up. It's missing the little clip you do there. Let's pull this aside.
Got a clear view of this motor mount here. Now we need to remove this power steering. This just slides right up. There we go, set this aside as well. Try not to put that upside down, not that it really matters, but ... Stay. Thank you. Okay. We've got a clear view of our alternator now. What we're going to do first is we're just going to disconnect this top electrical harness. It's got a little thumb squeeze tab. If you can't squeeze it with your thumb, you can use whatever you have next to you. I know this screwdriver is a little overkill. It's just what I had next to me. All you do is push down, pull it, take a peek at all your electrical connectors. If you take anything apart that's electrical, just take a peek. Make sure you don't see any funny colors, greens, blues, red, dirt, rust. You don't want any of that in there.
Now we can go ahead and remove our seven and our seven, and we'll get this out of the way. Just get this last bolt out of here. That's what it looks like. Put it up with the other one. There's a little rubber bushing here. You can either take it out or leave it in there. It's completely up to you what you want to do. We've got all this moved to side now. Now we have a complete clear view of the alternator.
Okay, so I've got my 14 millimeter wrench. I'm going to bring it down here. The tensioner is located right underneath the alternator. The tensioner is what keeps tension on the belt, obviously. Maybe I needed to say it, maybe I didn't. What we're going to do now is we're going to grab the wrench, carefully pull it towards the front of the vehicle. It's going to relieve tension on the tensioner and make it so the belts loose. At that point, I'm going to use my other hand and I'm just going to try to slide the belt off of one of the smooth pulleys, which would be this one right here. With all goes well, it should be fairly easy. So I'm going to grab it, carefully pull it, make sure I don't get myself into any pinch points. Can be dangerous, so you know, safety first, number one concern here at 1A Auto. I'm just going to give this a little pull just like that. Try to pull the belt off of the smooth pulley. Now I'm going to bring the wrench back. There we are. Can get the belt off of there. Perfect. We'll just leave this down like this, hopefully. There we are.
Right on the backside of the alternator is the electrical connector. That might be a little bit easier to get to once we unbolt it, so I'll try to unbolt the alternator first. At that point, we might be able to move it around and have a better view of what's going on with that. It's just a push connector, but to get the right angle, it's kind of hard to do. So I'm just going to unbolt this. I'm going to grab the tool to do it. We've got a mounting bolt here, and we'll have another one underneath there.
Okay, so just to show you where the bolts are on this, we have our wiring. It's pretty much the alternator is going to sit just like this inside the vehicle. So we've got one here. Okay? The other one's straight across. It's pretty much located underneath the pulley down under there, so easy peasy. Just two bolts to mount it. Once we get it unmounted, we can use a little pry bar, pry it out of there. We should be able to flip it enough to be able to see this, which is a little squeeze clip, and this right here, we'll be able to take that off as well. I'm going to set this aside, we don't need it in our hand.
I'm going to use my 10 millimeter, try to get it on this bolt. All I want to do is try to break it free, give it a couple of cranks here. Then I'm going to do the same thing to the other one, which is a little bit harder to get to, so I'll save this one, fully removing this one until the end. Okay, that's loose. Just got to get the socket off of there, and this one over. Okay, let me get my wrench out of there. I was hoping I could leave it in there, but it says no. Bolt's almost out, can finally turn it by hand. A little bit of penetrant spray really came in handy on this. Come on, baby. Just keep working it, pull to the side here, to the front, whatever it is.
So that's the bolt. I have to assume it was probably threaded in about this far. Yeah. Thank you, Ford. Set that aside. We're going to work on our forward bolt now. I'm going to grab a shorter socket, still sticking with my 10 millimeter though, just get one a little shorter. I'm going to try to get this one out of here. There it is, same as the first bolt. We don't have to worry about mixing them up. Catch my breath. I'm going to grab a pry bar, and I'm just going to try to go between the engine mount, or the mount on the engine where the alternator mounts onto, and the alternator and just give it a little pry. I just want to pull the alternator away. Once it gets far enough off of there, it should be clear to move around. So there's that side. Let's see if I can get the bottom side to come up as well. It's still wired in, so bear that in mind when you're doing this.
Okay, nice and free. Very cool. Nothing's ever really easy on these, but that's why we do it. We live for the challenge, the fight. All right, right here is the push pin that I was telling you about, the little push. You push that and then you lift up on the wiring harness, and it separates. Take a peek at your electrical connector, of course. That looks great. Set that aside. Right there, you have a 10 millimeter. We're going to remove that. I'm just going to grab my 10 millimeter socket I was using. If you're not replacing the alternator, you're just removing it so you can get to where you need to go, I would use some penetrant.
Just get this on there. More than likely, this is going to break right here. It's very common. I'm just kind of trying to shake it a little bit, see if I can get it to break free. If you felt as though that part's going to break, there's a nut right back here, you can remove that one. Get that off of there. That's what the nut looks like, got a little washer on there. I'll set that aside and grab this, slide it off of there just like that. There we are.
Okay, we can move on to the next step. All right, so next what we're going to do, we're going to clear a little space to get the alternator up through here. So I'm just going to disconnect this right here. Use something like a pocket screwdriver. Press right down in between there. I'd say give it a twist, but that doesn't look like it's looking too healthy, so I'm just going to try to separate the two. Get that piece out of there. There we go. Take a peek. Looks good. We'll set this stuff aside. Now I'm going to remove this bolt right here. It's going to take off this bracket, 10 millimeter.
Super loose with a ratchet, but not so loose by finger. There we are. That's what those two look like. Just put them together and set them aside. So that gives us a little bit more room. Now I'm going to come over here, take these two green pieces, squeeze them together and push out that green piece. Put on my safety glasses. I'm just going to pull this. It should separate. There we are. Set this right aside. Okay. Just giving us some room here.
Now I'm just going to try to take these, try to slide them as far out of the way as possible. Let's see. Okay, let me use my little fork-y tool, go right down in between the bracket and this wiring harness. I'm going to give it a tug as I pull, just some more wiring there. We'll shove this down and out of the way. All I'm trying to do here is just make as much room as possible for me to get this alternator up through here. Okay, get this out of the way. Okay. Now I'm going to take these, and I'm just going to try to gently maneuver them down and as far back as possible so I can have as much space as I can to get the alternator up and through here. Just give it a little push.
Okay, friends. So now what we're going to do, we're going to come over here. There's three 15 millimeter headed bolts, one, two, and three down there. Okay? I'm going to loosen those up/take them out, and that's so I can take this engine and I can maneuver it a little bit. Obviously I don't want to lift it right out of the car or anything, but it would be nice to move it a little bit. Hopefully give us a little bit more space behind here. All right. So I'm just going to use my safety glasses, hand protection, 15 millimeter, and an air gun. Can you use whatever you have, but the bolts are 15 millimeters. There we are. Okay. I might need to go get a floor jack. I'm going to try to lift up the engine a little bit, and then I'll be able to slide it out of the way.
Okay, so we've got our floor jack. I've got a nice pad. If you don't have a pad, make sure you use wood. We're going to wheel this under. We're going to go underneath the corner/edge of the oil pan. The edge should have a plenty of support. If you go underneath the center, there's a possibility that you could crush it. We don't want to do any of that. All we want to do though is be able to lift up this engine a little bit, just like that. Okay. Once this is up, we should be able to move the engine around, or at least move it forward. That's going to give us more room to be able to get that alternator out of there.
Okay. The engine can move around quite a bit. Let's see if it helped us out any. Let me see if I can get it un-wedged from where it is. This alternator is something else, I'll tell you that. They really buried it. Oh, yeah. And there we have our alternator.
Okay, friends, a quick product comparison for you. Over here, we have our 2001 Ford Focus alternator. We just removed it. Over here, we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. Yeah, it's a little dirty. My hands, my gloves are dirty. But I just wanted to show you. They match up completely the same, brand new pulley. It's got all the same amount of ribs there. That's very important. Make sure you have the same amount of ribs. Okay? The size of the alternator is the same. We don't have one that's really, really big and one that's really small. They both look exactly the same. We have our electrical areas. We've got our connector area right here, same as there. Same amount of prongs.
Right here is the part that we took off because we couldn't get the nut off. Here's where it is. That's the nut that we couldn't get off of the old one. This one comes with a new piece. If for some reason you can't get that nut off the other side and you can't get it off the line, and you did not break this, you can reuse it. If you kept trying and you snapped this, obviously you can't reuse it. But to go ahead and replace that, all you do is pop off this cover, take out that 10 millimeter right there, and then just put your old one right onto there. So that's pretty easy. Looks the same from the rear. Nothing different about them. They're both the exact same. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a great part to install into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
Okay, let's get the alternator in. We've got our brand new quality 1A Auto part. Hopefully it goes in a little easier than it wanted to come out, because that was fun. Everything has just got to be lined up perfect. The stars got to be aligned. There we are. Okay. Our alternator's back in here a little bit. We're just going to grab our lead wire. That's this. Maybe yours still has this attached to the old alternator and this wire came off for you. In which case, you would just tighten up this nut. You would put this nut back on, tighten it up. For me personally, I had to take off this whole thing off the old one, so I'm just going to put it onto the new one.
I've got my new alternator nut. I'm going to put it washer side down, obviously, if I can get it lined up. There isn't very much to grab onto here, going to mess with me. There we are. It's a good idea to do this before you go ahead and mount the alternator in there. People have been known to try doing it afterward and it just turns out to be a nightmare and you take it all the way back out. I've seen it done before. What happens is you can't get to this nut because the plastic intake is in the way, so the depth of the socket and the ratchet becomes an issue and you can't get a wrench down in there obviously.
So just make sure that's snug. You don't want to break off that stud, so once it feels like it's bottomed out, just give it a little bit extra, not too much, and you should be good to go. Now we're going to roll this down. We're going to get the ears lined up with the bracket assembly. See if I can ... The way to get it slid in essentially is, from as far back as you can, just try to bring it back and then line up the alternator slots, they look like this, with the bracket that looks like this. You just go from the back, right like that, and as you do that with the front side, the rear should be doing the same exact thing as well. So if you try coming in from up top and you go, "Eh, it won't go in because it's going at an angle, it doesn't like that." Just go from the back, slide it right in. Okay?
That looks like it's pretty good. Get our bolts. Just wiggle the alternator around a little bit if you need to. There we are. Not going to go ahead and tighten that up yet, obviously. I'm just going to get a few good threads. This rearward bolt, you're going to need to come in at an angle and come from the top of that brake line. Okay? So right over the top of it, find your slot or your hole. Just kind of bring it in, start it in the hole. Some gentle force should slide it right in. Okay, both of these are started. Give it a tug just to make sure that it does have good threads. Yeah. Cool. All right. Now I'm just going to go ahead and bottom both of these out and then we'll snug them up.
Okay. Shake it around. Feels good, it's not going anywhere. Pulley feels good. Sweet. Okay. Move along to our next step here. Start grabbing some of this stuff. Start lining it back up with where it needs to go. This is going to go there. This thing was right about here. Got this. This can go under here. It clips onto right there. So there's the green clip. Once you get your lines slid in there, and you just pop that in and that locks it. Okay? The green thing is the lock. We need to make sure you lock it in, so we'll slide it in and then push the green thing. You should see the two little ears come up and then lock out. That's going nowhere. That looks good. Okay.
Grab this. That's going to go there. Feel around. There should be electrical connectors. Move that again real quick just so we can see. We tucked some electrical connectors away, so we'll take them back out. This one right here. Bring it up and around if you want. Just right up between here. It likes it there. Get our connector here, bring that down. Good connection, good connection. Okay. Looks pretty good. Let's see.
This line right here should push right into that. That makes it so it can't flop around too much. All right. You got these, you've got this little bracket right here. Excuse me. Let's see. Can I take a look? Goes right up on here. Just look at it, see which way it looks like it goes. It goes this way. It has to go this way, just like that. That's where this clip's going to go onto, holds it from flopping around. There we are.
This right here, move this. We have our little blue clip right there. Just going to push that back into its hole. We'll take this, this big, the wider prong right there. That slides into that groove right there, and then it should lock in. Let's see if we can get it to do it. That feels good. Going no where. There we are. Okay. Just make sure we don't have anything hanging around right here. This goes to the back of the alternator. Right up along the top, you have your electrical connector. We're going to push it in, listen for a click. There we are, give it a little tug. That feels good.
Okay, the way we're going to do these, I'm just going to take the metal part out of the center of the rubber. At this point, you can put it where it needs to go just like that. If you need to use a little bit of lubricant, just grab some penetrant spray or silicone, whatever you have access to. Slide it back in there, just like that. Line it up with where it needs to go. Take your bolt, start it in. Same thing with the other one. This one's a little harder to reach, of course. There we are. Now we're just going to snug those up. I'm going to grab my socket. All right, going to use our 7 millimeter socket, snug it. Doesn't have to be anything too crazy tight, we're just screwing into plastic here. We don't need to use an air gun or anything, obviously. It's going nowhere. It feels good.
Okay, so we've got the belt going around all the pulleys here. I'm going to use my 14 millimeter wrench on the tensioner. I'm going to try to pull on this wrench to relieve pressure from the tensioner, and hopefully have enough slack with my belt. Okay. This on there. Release tension. Okay. All right. Let's take a peek, make sure your belt's on all the pulleys. Looks good. Perfect. Get our three bolts started. There we are. I'm going to get all these started. There we are. I'm going to lower the engine real quick. There we are. Tight, tight, tight, tight, tight. Looks good. We can continue.
Okay. This situated. Just get it all lined up, back to where we took it apart. Press this down in there. Little one. Needs to go in better. There we are. Very nice. Okay. This right here should have a little thing that comes out and slides over this. We're going to pretend it's there. Slide it over. We've got a little 10 millimeter bolt right here. I'm just going to see about starting it in. There we are. All right.
Okay, so now it's time to reconnect the negative battery terminal. When you go to connect it, it might arc or spark, make a funny noise. Might scare you a little bit, essentially. But all you want to do, just put it on there, one and done. Don't put it on, spark, jump it off, anything like that. Just go one and done. There we go. A little spark. No big deal. Push it down as far as it can go, and then just use your 10 millimeter, snug it up. There we are. Give it a little wiggle. It's not going anywhere. Grab our cover. It just goes in right over here. That's right there. There it is. Bonk, bonk. There we go. Easy peasy.
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Hi. I am Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
In this video we are going to show you how to replace an alternator on this 2003 Ford. This vehicle has two liter, Zetech engine. Tools you will need are a jack and jack stands. You will need to raise up the vehicle and access the belt from underneath to get it off. 10mm socket with a ratchet extension. You'll need a flexible handle, couple of the bolts are a little hard to get to so you'll need kind of a flexible handle to get into it. 15mm wrench, a pipe for some extra leverage, flat blade screw driver, and a seven millimeter socket. You don't need to remove belt fully, but if you do change your belt or if you take the belt all the way off or it just kind of slips off you want to know how to get it back together. This is the diagram for it.
10mm socket, loosen up you negative battery cable and disconnect it. On the passenger side of the engine compartment there is a 10mm bolt right here. Use a wrench socket extension. Take a look back in here you will see a little clip. What you are going to want to do is get a screwdriver down here, pry out on the water bottle a little bit, lift it up, and off. Okay. Pull these out of the clip and move your water bottle out of the way. Right here is your power steering reservoir, lift that up and move it out of the way as well.
Looking up from underneath you will find two bolts that hold this cover on, their 10mm as well. I'll just fast foreword here as I remove those two, 10mm bolts. If you look right up in here this is your belt tensioner. Put a 15mm wrench on there. I like to use a nice big piece of pipe, helps you get some extra leverage. As you go clockwise on that it actually loosens up the belt and you can pull the belt off of your AC compressor down here. Slowly let your wrench go.
Now reach in, pull the belt off the alternator pulley, and push it down out of your way. Okay we still need to create a little bit of room here. We're going to undo the bolt here that holds the bracket for this wiring harness. We are going to switch to a seven millimeter socket and remove this right here. Okay. Sorry about the angle there. We are kind of removing, it looks sort of like a round solenoid on the back firewall. Two, 7mm bolts hold it in place. Remove that and you can move it over towards the middle of the car to get it out of the way.
Okay. You can see our alternator right here. It is held in by a 10mm bolt over here, and I can't really film it, but there is a 10mm bolt basically opposite of that back towards the back of the car. The front one I am able to go down in there with just a regular ratchet and socket, 10mm. Okay, and I loosen up that first bolt using some force. Actually if you use your piece of pipe, put it on that ratchet, give yourself a little extra leverage, help get it loosened up. First I just loosen that one up. For that back one, it will help to have a flexible handle or a longer too, to get some leverage on it. Okay. I am going to fast forward here. What I do is take that flex handle and put it down in there. You need it flexible so it can kind of get around the pulley as well as get to the bolt. Generally what I have to do is turn it about an eighth of a turn, and then I have to take it back out, reposition the socket on the handle, then turn it another little bit of a turn, until you get it going. Once you get it out a certain distance you can change over to your ratchet and get it out the rest of the way with the ratchet. Then once you have that one out ... When you pull it out it, it will come out, it will hit the body of the car. If you just force it kind of down, you can get it down and out. Then once you have that one out, then you can turn your attention to the one that is very easy to see. Put the ratchet on there, loosen it up, and take it right out.
Okay I am going to reach in and pull your alternator up and out. Okay, as you saw I was able to, move by hand ... Sometimes you may need to use a crowbar or a large screwdriver and pry it a little bit to break it free. Then you just want to kind of just pull it up and out a little bit. Pull your alternator kind of up and out so you can easily see where the power wire goes in. That is by looks a 10mm nut and right here is where it connects. Where your harness connects to the alternator. Okay go in with a long screw driver and reposition the alternator by pressing on the side of the connector and I'm going to pull up with my left hand, pressing on the side with my screwdriver and pulling it with my left hand and disconnecting that connector. I'm just going to fast forward here as I use a ten millimeter socket and a ratchet to reposition the alternator so you can get to that nut that holds the power wire on ... remove that power wire from the alternator. There's really no right great angle to video it. So I am going to fast forward through it.
Okay, now the challenge is to get the old alternator out and the new one back in. Kind of try to move some things out of the way. Disconnect that harness. Okay we can pull this off of there. We want to disconnect this line which I am pinching in on this green tube. Pushing that green clip up and out. Disconnecting that. Okay now what you want to do is take these two ... and pretty much force them, bend them, down below where the alternator is. The alternator can come out. It's a tight fit, but it comes up and out. Here's the new alternator from 1AAuto. Put it right down in, basically, the same way. Once you get it down in you are pretty successful. Okay, rotate it in place.
Okay I'm gonna kind of fast forward as we put everything back together. It's just a reversal procedure. Get the alternator down in there, kind of bend the tubes back up into their correct position, reconnect the lead, and then reconnect the power wire. Tighten up the 10mm knot that holds that in place. Continue to fast forward. Work the alternator into place. Could be a little difficult sometimes but work it into place. Start the easy bolt first, the one you can see right ... easily at the engine. Start that one in first and then start the other one that's on the back side. Again, you'll have to start with the head way down to the body and kind of angle it up in until you get it in. Then tighten those bolts up and then you can start putting the other stuff back up in the firewall where it belongs.
Okay, put the green clip back on and reconnect that hose to that tube. Put the item back on the firewall. Start those bolts in. Make sure you reconnect the wiring harness and put that harness clip back on where it belongs. Be sure to tighten everything back up.
If you did take your belt all the way off, you don't have to, but if you did here's the belt routing diagram, that'll help you get it back on there correctly. Okay, so from the top, you can see we've got the belt pretty much forced down. We've got it on top of our alternator here and we got it on top of our power steering pump here, and below this idler pulley. Okay so the belt comes down and take this loop and you need to kind of twist it and force it up onto the water pump. Then this loop comes down, you'll have to bypass your AC compressor for right now. Put that under the crank and pull it as tight as you can. You're going to take your 15mm wrench again, put your pipe on there. Loosen that tensioner, pull your belt down, and make sure it's on there. I see one little problem. It's not quite on the crank correctly. Okay I am just going to fast forward here. Unfortunately I do not do a good job of filming it, but just check you pulley. I noticed that it's not ... It's one groove off on the crank so I loosen it back up, take it off the AC compressor pulley, get it onto the crank pulley correctly, check all the rest of the pulleys to make sure it's on there right, and then put it back on again. Okay. Just confirm belts on the alternator well and on the power steering pump correctly.
I am going to continue to fast forward as I put that dust and rock shield back in place. Use the two bolts and bolt it back in place. You can see I am using air tools now just to kind of get it done quickly. Just continue through fast forward as I put that power steering reservoir back in place. It just kind of presses in the place with the rubber grommets. Then put the coolant reservoir back in place and put the 10mm bolt in place to hold it. Okay reconnect your negative battery cable and tighten it up. Okay. Battery light goes out and stays out.
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