Can someone help? I need to drive my dart tomorrow
That red wire that goes through the grommet is attached to pos terminal on battery and is not connected to anything under the dash
Oh Boy Oh boy. We're going to have to unravel what has been done. Is it easy to disconnect from the battery terminal? If so, do that right away. If that sparks you'll weld something!
When you guys say ballast resistor, what exactly are you speaking of?
Its that vertical white bar attached to the firewall. Its a resistor to reduce the voltage going to the coil when the engine is running. The white is ceramic which provides electrical insulation and heps disapate the heat. In the back is a cavity holding the resistance element.
Also what is the function of this?
Automotive coils were designed to run at something less than 12 volts. Give it 12 volts for too long and they get hot and eventually fail.
I cleaned up the firewall for a solid ground for VR
Solid ground to the body. Good. Now check that there is a good ground from body to the battery negative and also the alternator case.
Connected the ammeter wires together
Thought you did that way back. I'm not against using the ammeter but that one post didn't look good.
When revved voltage still doing the same thing. 16 to 17.
Yes of course.
Would seem to me the problem is either the VR or the alternator, unless I don’t quite have well enough of an understanding of this which is probably the case haha.
I was starting to get that feeling. Did you understand what an electomagnet is? If not, then its really hard to understand what the 'Field' is.
Until then, here is a way to understand it why the problem is in the wiring.
The Voltage regulator can only respond to the voltage it 'sees'. If it sees 14 Volts, it 'thinks' everything has enough power. If the wire going to the regulator has 11 Volts, or 6 Volts, it 'thinks' the alternator needs to provide more power. So if your regulator is seeing 6 Volts, its going to tell the alternator to produce more power and continue to do so until it comes up to 14.5 Volts.
