Alternator/Electrical Issue

[burnz109]

I bought my mx-3 in june from a lady who wanted to get rid of it because she bought a new vehicle for her family.

It had 162k on it when i bought it. has 165 currently. Its a v6, auto. 1996.

It was working fine for about a month, then my alternator died. I replaced it with a rebuilt, ran for about another good month. Then one night went out for a spin and the alternator started to make a bad smell. It smelt like electrical fire. I had the alternator rebuilt again. After 5 minutes of idling, it started giving a light smoke. I turned it off, kicked the bumper in anger and walked away. I bought a battery thinking that the alternator had been smoking because the battery it was working with was dead. The car was working fine for a bit after that, then one day i barely made it home. Now im biking to work because the new battery didnt make a difference, my car wont start and wont keep going after a boost.

I stopped running my deck and amp as soon as the second alternator went, disconnected fully.

Im thinking to replace the alternator once more, and the battery at the same time and see what happens. But I also dont want to invest anymore money into this car.

By the way, I got a code from check engine light saying that my torque converter is gone. Also my car jerks when i change gear, and under load it wont get out of first gear till 7k rpm.

Hope i didnt leave this too vague. Thanks in advance

[Ryan]

Sounds like bad grounds/bad wiring.

Clean up all the terminals on the battery/alternator/and the grounds between the engine/trans and chassis.

Disconnect the battery and throw an ohmmeter across the positive and negative terminals of the harness. You should see SOME continuity, but almost nothing. We're talking 20mA or 600 ohms...

[Newfie_dan]

ok deal with the obvious stuff first, replace the charge wire, engine ground and chassis grounds with new wiring, that will eliminate any high resistances thereby reducing any load on the alternator. Next to deal with the trans issue, change the fluid and filter then if that clears up your harsh shifting issue upgrade the cooler, the automatics were not a bad trans despite what many people tell you on here, the problem that made them fail so frequently was the cooler, its just a piece of pipe and provided crap cooling for the atf, upgrade it to a larger one with fins and you will add a huge amount of useful time to the trans.