IIRC, the starter on my Formula Ford 1600cc required 140-160 Amps.

UPDATE:

Got the Alternator from Oreily's auto parts for $204+tax. It has a lifetime warranty. It was fairly easy to put in, but you do want to take that bolt off by the bottom bracket screw as this gives you more room to work it into place.

It works great but the oil check thing still doesn't work. I am getting 12.x for the battery and when I start it I get 14 so the alt is doing its job.

Questions:
1.) my radio doesn't work and I checked all the fuses except the radio(next)
2.) my oil check thing only blinks and doesn't perform its test.

Everything else seems to work fine. any ideas on the oil check thing?

Power's another beast altogether. 20A at 14v=.5hp more or less. That sounds about right to me. 150A at 14v would be 3hp, which would make your starter about the size of a large pool pump, which might be necessary on a higher compression vehicle.

As Voltage goes down, the impedance of the motor goes down, which causes current flow to increase. So if you're starter pulls 20A @ 14V, it'll pull 40A @ 7V. You're rolling an unloaded engine. You can roll the engine by pushing the car while it's in gear fairly easily with 1 person and we generate much less power than a horse.

similar problem
 

I just retrieved my car from the winter to find out that my battery was complete dead. The battery was about 2 years old and I know they drain fast on these cars. So I put a new one in and everything seemed to work fine. I took it out to re set the electronics and realized the radio or wipers didnt work. I was also getting to flashing oil lights as well. The battery light never went off. After about 30mi of driving I started seeing all the warning lights come on and the car eventually died (about a block from my house) I was able to jump and get in going for another few minutes until it dies again. First guess was alternator. Did you get everything working again? Any help is greatly appreciated.

That does indeed sound like an alternator problem Klimo. You could take the battery to a parts store and have them check it to make sure it'll hold a charge, but the battery light being on is a good indication that it's something on the alternator.

I figured as much. How much is a new alternator and install as i'm not exactly mechanically inclined to do it myself. I thought I could get more than 30mi out of a brand new battery with no alternator though. Is this normal?

Actually 30 mi. on just battery power is pretty good.

The real problem with leaving the battery hooked up in the car for anything more than a couple weeks is that there is constant current draw through several circuits/components of the car.

As the battery wears down, current delivery becomes sporatic as the battery continues it's internal chemistry - sometimes there is enough power to charge the circuit and others, there isn't - the drain is not at all linear as one might expect.

This can introduce power surges, arcing inside components such as relays and switches, and actually cause these to fail. The diode pac in the alternator is particularly susceptible to this kind of non-constant current flow and why we see so many alternators fail at springtime.

It's so simple to access the battery on these cars that's it's beyond me why anyone would store the car with the battery hooked into the car's circuitry.

I know there is a lot of myth out there about losing the DME's adaptive settings, but that's not at all a problem. Once the car is running regularly again, the DME will re-adapt in short order, unless of course there are other issues which remained 'masked'. But if that's the case, the DME losing it's settings wasn't the problem to begin with.

It seems pretty clear that the best, and certainly the safest, way to store the car (whether using a battery maintainer or not), is to disconnect the battery from the car's circuitry for the duration of the storage period. In fact, I believe it's better to remove the battery altogether to remove all risk of a battery explosion, fire, or leak - any of which would get really expensive, really fast!

Cheers!

My alternator died at slightly higher mileage too.