Well here's the update. THe good part is that we got it running and are currently in Salem IL for the night, about 11 hours of driving left to get to Arlington TX. We jumped it this morning at the gas station, then drove to an AutoZone to rewire what we had found through the wiring diagrams.

Battery was junk (under warranty at AZ), voltage regulator did not have a good enough ground, bulkhead connector and two wires were melted pretty bad, fusible link was bad (not burnt in two though), one ammeter stud was super loose, etc... The wires that were burnt up had significant corrosion on them, indicating that this has probably been in process for a while.

All in all, we spent about 5 hours in the AZ parking lot bypassing bulkhead, rewiring different sections, bypassing ammeter, eliminating a few wire nuts I found from the previous owner, etc..

Replaced the fusible link with an in line 30A blade fuse, but after researching this evening apparently that is not the way to go. It popped sometime during our first drive, and the car was dead at the gas station again after getting there. We just put in a new fuse and continued on driving. Once it cooled down I pull the fuse on one of the Spal rad fans to lower the load in the system, and it seemed to help (fuse is okay).

Now I'm troubleshooting a light wiring issue. The dimmer switch is disconnected (has been since the PO) and two of the pins on the connector were jumpered so that the dash lights work. At one point today, the parking lights flickered on and off by themselves with the switch in the off position. We just turned on the lights to stop the flickering. We pulled the jumper to see if that would change things, and it just killed the dash lights. I can wiggle the ignition switch harness to aggravate the problem (and curiously get the dash lights to work without the jumper too). I'm now thinking per someone's either post (thanks!) that the blue w tracer IGN wire in the harness is shorted to the parking light wire somewhere in the harness (we repaired the visibly burnt sections, but obviously I can’t see inside the harness). This wire runs to the regulator, and could be causing some of the other charging problems.

The plan here is to do as suggested, and run another 12V wire (planning to repurpose the oil warning light feed wire that comes off the same ignition switch terminal as the burnt wire) to the regulator. Hopefully when I disconnect the current one it will fix the lights too.

Thank you guys for all of the suggestions and keep them coming. So weird, we drove this car on HRPT two years ago in the exact same configuration (only difference is water pump speed to get better cooling at low RPM) with the electric fuel pump and dual fans, with ZERO electrical problems.

I'll post up tomorrow with the results of the day.

-Dave