Woody,
                 Can you guesstimate the number of miles you ran on
your alternator?  These gizmos have carbon brushes that wear out in
time..... and more quickly in a dirty/gritty environment.  My SO's
1987 325is with 150K miles on the odo was uncomfortably below the
Bentley wear limit when I checked the brushes for preventive
maintenance.  This is easy to do on Bosch alternators, though I
recommend buying the complete Bosch regulator+brush assembly unless
you are handy with a soldering iron.  I bought replacement brushes
alone, and spent ~2 hours making a jig for soldering the new ones.  I
can tell you more about this via p-mail in lieu of using bandwidth
here.  Best of luck!

Glenn.........  Queenstown, Maryland

PS:  Frank,  pls check for MIME this time.  Because of the attachment,
my ISP cut off much of the Digest of Thursday, March 09, 2000 11:39
AM........  FYI