Quote:

No. The insulation is evenly burned off from the alternator terminal to the wire (spliced into the harness) coming off the battery pos. post. The bulkhead connector is not burned nor is the wiring to the ammeter under the dash. It's just very odd. The plastic on the alt batt. connection that keeps the post from grounding out on the housing is missing. It looks like this might have caused the path to ground but it could have melted away due to the heat.



It sounds like somebody in the past did a charging circuit bypass of the dash harness/ammeter. This was (is) a well-known issue with the Mopars and having a marginal charging circuit. This is a common mod to make where you take a wire directly from the alternator stud to the positive battery cable/terminal. However, this is not really safe unless you either splice in on the firewall side of the fusible link or insert another fusible link on this bypass wire. This would have helped prevent this exact issue you have now where the entire wire burns.

Is the original harness connector hooked up on the alternator stud? If so, you may just want to remove the bypass connection there and cut off the other end from the splice (wrap well) and see if the car will run/charge without the dimming lights, etc. Provided nothing else has been monkeyed with, this would be the original setup.

You can then pull a new wire from the alternator stud but I would terminate it on the starter relay with a loop connector instead of the splicing into the battery cable. Use a 8ga or better wire with a 16ga fusible link. You could go with a fuse but fusible links are better on charging circuits as they will "blow" much slower than a standard fuse if there is a consistent (as opposed to momentary spike) problem i.e. short to ground. This mod is commonly known here as the 'MAD electrical upgrade'.

I am willing to bet if you take a multimeter and measure resistance from ground to the alt stud, you will have little resistance. If you then pull off the bypass wire and measure again, probably open. This would confirm that this bypass link is indeed the problem.