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Disconnected the red wire at the alt and jumped from the field terminal to the battery and the charge dropped to 14.7 but when I shut the key off the engine stopped as normal. What does that tell us? BTW thanks for all the advice I'm getting from everyone.

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14.7 at the battery Still a little higher than I like, but better than almost 16.

Normally, when the key turns off, it kills the power to the ignition system.

When I did my test, I didn't disconnect the red(blue) wire at the alt - so when I turned the key off, the ignition system continued to have power, and the engine ran on. Your regulator still got power only through the key, so that's why it turned off when you flipped the key.

Now for the fix... you have ~1v of drop from going through the bulkhead (twice), ignition switch plug (twice), and the switch itself. You can either start probing the wires along that path until you find and fix the bad connection(s)... or what I did was install another relay to power the ignition system, triggered by the old blue wire.

I know you say most of that is new, but there's still a bad connection somewhere