Who has had an alternator go up in flames while driving down the road?

Me too!

Lucky for me I was right near a gas station. Put it out with an extinguisher and disconnected the battery. I for one am glad that toyota put the alt on the exhaust side of the engine instead of right under the intake manifold! Who knows what would have happened if it would have caught the gas on fire also! Needless to say, the next thing I will be buying is a fire extinguisher for each vehicle.

Anyway, I haven't had the chance to really look and see what caused the fire, could be something to do with the wiring or something leaking on the alternator when it decided to short out. I'm trying to figure out how to fix this, and it may be my calling to go ahead and fix the whole screwed up wiring harness.

As some of you may already know, I got this truck not too long ago and the po had swapped a 95 engine into the 85 4runner (that I purchased from him), not failing to hack up the harness and make it a piss poor job of an engine swap.

So here's what I have so far;

1. get the little bit of wires that run to the alt and splice the new section in right and hope that I don't have to mess with it in the future.

2. Swap out the computer, wiring harness, and intake manifold (if there are too many differences, I know the injectors are different) and be able to have the peace of mind that all my wires are where they are supposed to be, no stray wires anywhere, and have everything work the way it should without having to rig anything up.

I'm leaning towards #2 so far, but I'll just have to see what the damage is and go from there.

It just never stops with this truck...

 

sounds scary ive never had an alternator start on fire, but i have had bad electrical start on fire. i was like 14 and i freaked out because it was my dads truck that i was moving around the driveway lol.

 

I only read that first couple lines, because it was funnier if i left it at that.