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Thanks for the replies everyone.
I've got some more information to share.
First, I have found a guy locally who has stripped a couple of 850s for parts and has at least one alternator I can buy from him cheap. I actually think you guys are right and it's my belt, but I'm not accustomed to not having spare parts like this around so I might pick it up anyway if he'll let it go cheaply. I have a question on this though. If one of them is OEM (Bosch I think?) and one is aftermarket, should I go with the probably-older-but-probably-better-quality OEM one, or the slightly-worse-quality-but-probably-newer-and-less-miles aftermarket one? Any advice?
Second, I finally got a volt meter on the thing last night. It actually seemed okay in the driveway - the battery was giving me ~12.5 with the car off, and with the car running I was getting ~13.8, so not /great/ charging power, but not bad.
Everything seemed fine for the first little bit of the drive too, staying between ~13.5 - ~14.5 volts.
Then all of a sudden it just went down to ~12.3 volts and the idiot light came on (I think the lower threshold must be around 12.3 volts because that's about where it was when the light came on/off).
This morning again, things started out fine in the mid 13s, then after a certain point it dropped suddenly to below 12 (~11.8) again and pretty much never went up again.
So, I'm definitely looking at an UNDER-charging scenario as opposed to an OVER-charging one.
I'm beginning to suspect the drive belt as well, and come to think of it, my power steering has been feeling a little stiff the past few days too.
So what's the hypothesis here
- the belt is stretched as they all do, and the tensioner just ran out of room to take up the slack?
- should I suspect my tensioner as well?
- I read somewhere that some of these alts have a freewheel pulley on them
- does mine have the freewheel pulley? how do you tell?
- can you change this separately?
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