M42 starter and alt wiring

[jaredmac11]

Hey all, doing this without a reference.

I'm running a 2 gauge wire from the distributor (come from the battery) to the starter. Then I was planning on running another 2 gauge wire from the starter to the alternator; or should it be smaller? I could be confused and it MAY be a 4 gauge wire, but I believe its 2.

For the Alt ground... where am I grounding the alt to? Is there a bolt for this on the engine, or is it typically grounded to the engine body?

[e30sh]

I would just mimic factory gauges. It's shown in metric in the ETM. 2 gauge is fine for the starter, starter to alt can be a lot smaller.

Since the M42 alt is mounted in bushings, it has a ground wire that runs from the housing to the mount.

[jaredmac11]

The ETM has the number 10, can I assume thats 10mm which is a 00 gauge? That seems huge. Its the same size or bigger than my battery cable..

[vpilarrt]

The sizes in the ETM are mm2 (mm squared), so 10 converts to 7 AWG.

[jaredmac11]

That makes more sense. I may have gone too big then with the 1/0 gauge lol.

[jaredmac11]

There's a large gauge wire running between the starter and alt in the harness, do I have to introduce another wire? Or a ground wire to any place? Im assuming the groundw ire in the alt was already tight but I'll try and look out for it.

[jaredmac11]

e30 faq had all I needed. a wire between the alt and starter would be redundant.