I had a small electrical fire in the 62 today...
I shut the engine off and heard some sizzling. It was the wires to the ammeter mounted under the dash. I disconnected the battery before it spread... WHEW!
The little hose to the oil pressure gauge next to it melted and it really started smoking!
So I poked around and saw that both wires to the ammeter were fried and so was the ground wire from the generator to the voltage regulator mounting bolt.
The previous owner spliced into the wire from the"bat" terminal on the voltage regulator to the ammeter, and then back from the ammeter to the starter... and didn't use a fuse!
It is hard to tell exactly what happened but I do have some clues:
The burned wire stops where he spliced it near the starter. The rest of that wire appears fine(from the starter to the "bat" terminal of the ignition switch I'm thinking?).
The middle contact in the voltage regulator barely opens(I mean a frogs hair). The inside of the voltage regulator doesn't smell burned in any way though....
At idle the "gen" idiot light wouldn't completely go out and the ammeter would read 0 or just above 0. Give it gas and it would move though.
There has been a faint grinding noise under the hood from the same side as the generator. I didn't think it was the generator though since it has been working fine...
I can fix the wiring easy enough. I am afraid of something in the generator or the voltage regulator being a problem? I also forgot to polarize it when I put the battery in a couple weeks ago. Could that cause the wires to melt?
Is there a way to test these components individually?
Do ammeters fail and cause these problems? If I dare hook it up again it will be with a 30 amp fuse!