Am I going to start my truck on fire?

[Alfred Lord Tenniscourt]

I just swapped in a new 300 from a 94 f-150, and kept the new alternator. The wiring is very similar to the 3g wiring, so I hooked it up in virtually the same way. The only difference is that instead of a cool terminal on the side of the alternator, I have two heavy wires. They are the same black and red color, and look to be about 8ga. In order to hook the thing up, I twisted them together and spliced them to a 4ga gable which I ran to the battery side of the starter solenoid. This seems pretty much right to me, but I can't for the life of me figure out why they would use two wires instead of one and I am a little nervous to start the truck before I figure out why.
Anybody got any ideas???
Also, what is the reasoning behind that 560 ohm resistor in the alternator wiring circuit? It can't be right to put it in parallel with the gauge light or to use only the resistor if there is no light unless I am mis-understanding something. The two circuits yield two very different resistances. The first is 280 ohms (assuming the idiot light is 560 ohms) the second is 560. I am guessing that the field coil doesn't care too much what it gets as long as it gets a little jump start though, so it doesn't really matter...
Thanks,
ALT

[Thunderfoot]

On the two power wires - I've seen where some do this to help make routing the wire easier and able to put the smaller terminals on the smaller wire instead of the one Big wire. Or it might have gone to 2 different places on the truck before, one to the battery and one to a power terminal somewhere else. You should be just fine
On the resistor in parallel with the light – the resistor is there for when the light bulb burns out so that the power for the exciter wire still gets to the voltage regulator. The voltage Regulator does need some resistance to switch on correctly / work. The stock wiring on our trucks has a resistive wire from the ignition switch for this purpose.

[Alfred Lord Tenniscourt]

Cool, I will go ahead and start her up in a few days here and let everyone know if we were wrong...