Alternator

First off, one must decide whether or not the kit supplied alternator will be adequate enough to supply everything you end up installing on your ship.  If you just go with the basics that RotorWay provided in the kit it will work but if you add navigation lights and a strobe you will be pushing the little 31 amp alternator past its potential to produce enough power to supply it all.  Then add a com radio, transponder, encoder, gps, bearing temp gauge, intercom and headsets as most folks end up doing you'll need a larger output alternator for sure.  We ended up trading up to the bigger 51 amp unit after we figured out that installing most of if not all of the above will involve tearing the ship back down.  New harnesses may have to be made, components would have to be moved and on and on so we decided to bite the bullet and do everything we thought we would ever want in our ship now. As it turned out after we got the upgrade there isn't anything to do harness wise, everything you do is at the mounting spot so adding it in later wouldn't be a big deal at all. What we ended up installing aside from the normal stuff was a GPS/Com radio plus a cooling fan to keep it from over heating, an intercom, 2 ship powered headsets, transponder, encoder, nav lights, landing light, instrument lights, a 3 unit strobe light system, and a bearing temp gauge.  Well all this is going to take alot of extra power to fire up and we're not really sure the 51 amp unit is going to do it so we're doing the wait and see thing and hoping we won't have to go to a larger amp output unit up the road because it also takes more horse power away from your engine. 

No tricks here and it's by the books for the small 31 amp unit but when you get the larger unit the voltage regulator is built into the unit so you don't have any of that to install, you just wire it a little different.  The bracket to tighten the fan belt up with is rather marginal but I guess it works, well just have to wait and see.  There is a picture on this page of another one you may want to produce if you don't like the factory method.  When you tighten the belts up the final time you are supposed to tighten the belt up to the point that you can still rotate the alternator by hand, that isn't going to work if I'm not mistaken but that is how we did it.  Perhaps in the big picture of thing there's a reason to allow it to slip.  I know on an automobile you can't do that or the alternator will not produce enough power and you will not have enough power to maintain the battery and you'll end up walking so you may want to check into this.