72 Swinger not charging battery
At one point I was trying to make the point that ALL underhood loads should be powered by your relay.
So far as the ammeter, maybe it's stuck? Or maybe static electricity? Try taking a damn towel, and just barely wiping the cluster face area in front of and around the ammeter and see if the needle moves. The system may also be generating "just enough" to move the needle. You have a multimeter with a 20A scale? Put it at the output of the alternator and see just what it is doing. A safer way would be to "rig" an old stop/ tail lamp filament in series with the alt output to see if it is charging enough to light.
Well I gave up on trying to determine where the resistance is that's pulling IGN 1 down to 10.5V.
I added my own blue wire to the alt field + and appropriate terminal on the VR, and tied it into batt + on the output side of the relay.
I'll just cross my fingers and carry a fire extinguiser for the time being until the weather is conducive to testing under the dash. I went through the bulkhead connectors, I don't think the poor connection is there.
The ammeter now shows around +40 when the engine is running. It returns to zero when the engine is off.
Drove it around a bit today, runs pretty good, the TB EFI and HEI distributor are working well.
I need to check the ign advance, not sure what the CHINACO HEI distributor is adding, I just set intitial timing to 8 degrees BTDC and moved on. I'm not winding the engine way up anyway, and I'll verify total timing tomorrow.
Biggest issue now is the Z bar is sliding sideways. The ends of the spring clip protruding into the groove in the plastic bushing is not enough to hold the z bar in position. Being as the bushing has just as much tendency to spin in the z bar tube as to spin on the spherical end of the stud, eventually the cut in the bushing will line up with the spring clip, allowing the zbar to move sideways. Being as my car was an automatic, and whomever did the conversion did a shitty job of locating and reinforcing the hole for the body side z bar stud, the z bar is likely loaded sideways, and thus it's tendency to shift. I did not relocate the hole but did reinforce the body enogh to keep the stud from bending opposite the direction of appled force. I'm going to make brass spacers that will hold the z bar side to side.