Hi all, merry xmas!
Today decided to tinker with the mini. Its a 68? mini van with the traveller conversion. It had a cheapo cassette player in it, clubman heater, clubman electric screen washers and the standard generator. Obviously was struggling with the power flow at night in the rain when its cold. So decided to upgrade to a rover mini alternator. Following the how to on ausmini successfully converted to alternator and lights are brighter at low revs and nothing is dying when everything is turned on, except the cheap cd player we put in it. I wired the cd player up before converting to alternator and it worked well with the genny except when you required anything else electric like lights horn, brake lights etc.. now with the alternator on, everything else has improved except the cd player. when you touch the brakes or put on the blinker the cd player stops cold like a wire has been disconnected. as soon as you turn the blinker off it all starts up again. I know im missing some small annoying point here, anyone want to throw in their suggestions please?
Thanks

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88 Rover 1.3i "Reggie"
99 Rover 1.3i “Grover”
12 Mini Cooper S "The shitter"
17 Mini Clubman JCW “Noddy”

I am no electric expert but sounds like not enough currency on that line.
If you have the CD player connected to same line that has lots of items running perhaps the fuse or the wire needs upgrade.

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Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak

Yeah I considered that too, so this morning went and bought some new thicker, higher current wire, all new connectors, made sure earth connection was good.. its just got me stumped.

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88 Rover 1.3i "Reggie"
99 Rover 1.3i “Grover”
12 Mini Cooper S "The shitter"
17 Mini Clubman JCW “Noddy”

The simple way to test it is to wire the cd player directly to the positive battery wire at the front of the car. This is temporary only, but if it works then you know you're overloading the accessory circuit.
I'd suggest putting in a small fuse block to provide power to accessories when a relay turns it on. That will take some load off the original circuit to give it some more life.

I had a similar problem a few years ago with an electric aerial. Every time you turned nearly anything on, the aerial would go down, then come back up again.

I cured it by putting 5 amp diode in the circuit feeding the aerial and then a big capacitior across the power feed to the aerial.

The electrical loads coming on caused a spike on the line and that was enough to set the aerial off, even though there was more than enough capacity in the system. The capacitor provided enough reserve power while the rest of the system stabalised and the diode prevented that reserve from flowing back to the rest of the system.

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Going by memory, most CD players take most of their power from the aux wire and only use a trickle of current from the V+ wire (to run the clock and keep settings when the car is turned off). I'd be guessing that there is too much load on the aux circuit. A rover alternator should have plenty of current. I had halogens, driving lights and a four speaker system running from my stock 34 amp lucas alternator.

It could be that the alternator is not charging at a high enough voltage. I'm not sure what voltage a generator can provide, but at higher revs it could have been providing a higher voltage. Now that the alternator is charging at a lower voltage, a small load on the aux circuit will drop it below the level required to run the CD player.