Charging Gremlins - RESOLVED

This artical may be of help here

Hi Ron,
Thanks for the pointer to that article. I reviewed it (good stuff in there) and am happy to report that my ammeter already has the 'fix' of securing the cables with the multiple lock washers and nuts, and everything was nice and tight when I checked it out.

After reading an article on bypassing the ammeter and going with a volt meter, I'm tempted to go that route, however, the battery boiling over has me thinking there is a problem somewhere else in the chain that needs to be handled first ... I'm going to check on the alternator and regulator (make sure grounding is ok), but I don't have the gear to do a lot of testing - certainly not up to pulling the alternator to do bench tests at this point. If there are some simple tests that I can do using a standard multi-meter without taking out the firewall (so, at the battery, at the fuse box, or at the back of the ammeter), I'd rather do those first.

Any thoughts/advice welcome.

Hooked up a charge tester to the battery and had my wife slowly increase the revs to see what happened.

Well, the voltage kept going up with the RPM, around 2500RPM it passed 17volts and I had her ease off. My best guess is that it's the regulator, so I've picked up a replacement (about $45 at the local auto parts place), and I'll try to get under the car over the weekend to put it in.

The other thing I learned is that you guys aren't watching my back! No one told me that once my wife sat behind the wheel with the engine running, the only way to get her to come out was by placing an open box of chocolate up-wind and wait for her to take the bait.

In less time than it took the kids to watch Jungle Book, I got the car up on stands, crawled under, crawled back out, disconnected the battery, crawled back under, discovered I needed metric sockets for this job ... yadda yadda (you know you've all been there) ... took off the old regulator - which had 'Heavy Duty' emblazoned on it and was twice the thickness of the new one, but only 1/2 the weight - put in the new one, dropped the car back down, re-connected the battery, fired it up, and even up to 2500 revs, she was only putting 14 volts into the battery.

A really cool added benefit is that the Tachometer had started misbehaving (It would climb to between 2500 & 3000, then drop to zero, then when I shift up, it would try climbing again, but never get above 3500 and would jitter and drop and rise). I guess the over-voltage was playing havoc with it as well, because after doing the regulator, the Tack is working perfectly now.

Gremlin Eliminated!!!