I seem to be having a problem in the electrical system of my truck, if you can believe that.
The problem first started about 1 1/2 years ago when my starter burnt up, and ended up taking the battery, alternator, and regulator out with it. I replaced all four, and everything was ok, till about 6 months ago.
I was leaving work to go to a diesel show a few hours away, and the charge wire from my alternator comes unhooked from it's connector by the hot wire. The amp gauge started going wild, all my dash lights went out, and the radio restarted itself about 3 times, then erupted into a smoke ball. I didn't realize what was happening, so I turned on my dome light, not sure why, and saw an arc jump from one side to the other under the lens. A really big arc. Besides the dash lights, every light on the truck had literally exploded from whatever had happened. I rehooked the cable, bought a new regulator and all new lights, and went drove the whole way with no radio. No other incidents occured, besides having the lowest dyno number of the day.
Now, onto my problem. When running, my charge gauge has stayed in the same place since I've owned the truck. It stays at about the 3/4 mark, but if the idle drops too low or something like that it responds correctly by dropping to around 1/2. However, recently it seems to bounce around, not a lot,maybe from one side of the 3/4 mark to the other, but it seems to be timed with the idle of the truck. Also, if the window gets stalled out, it overcorrects kind of wildly when the button is let off.(how I burnt up my fresh new junkyard radio I spent 3 hours looking for)
I just put in some new Westach gauges, boost and Pyro, and the pyro gauge seems to have a complete mind of it's own. sometimes it's bottomed out, sometimes it's pegged, and, when cruising about 60ish, it seems to work fine. The old gauge I got from them was rated for 12-30 volts, but this new one says 12v only. I've got a good ground, and the probe ohms out good, but the truck is charging at 14.6 volts now, and I wonder if that's a problem. Since I was using a digital meter, I assume that's an average of the high/low sweeps of the needle. I pull my battery cables off when I park it, and sunday when I popped the hood the battery was smoking out the vents and smelled like acid really bad.
I've cleaned the ground to the block that comes off the alternator, and I've had 2 regulators now that haven't seemed to change anything. Any chance I've somehow screwed up the alternator again when the cable came unhooked? My next step is another ground to the frame from the block, but I figured I'd ask here before I went under that oily-ass thing.