anyone know what process they use to by pass ammeter.have anyone here had it done by them. i have a rally dash. thanks

no need for that... ammeter can be kept with a good output alt

http://www.dodgecharger.com/forum/index.php/topic,33574.0/all.html

Look at the back of your Rallye Dash cluster. There are two threaded studs that the amp gauge is hooked up with. You can locate it by looking where the amp gauge is mounted and locating the two threaded studs that emerge on the back of it.

I bypassed my amp gauge by simply bolting all the positive connections to the input side of the amp gauge stud. I could also have left it wired as the factory did it, as I do not have any high amp loads added to the car.

The main problem with Mopar electrical systems is that the power from the alternator passes through the bulkhead, through the amp gauge and back out the bulkhead to the starter relay and then on to the battery.

That's a lot of amps going through a less than ideal connection at the bulk head. Age, corrosion, water and dirt can easily penetrate the bulk head connectors leading to a build up of resistance = heat at the connectors.

Many nice Mopars went up in flames as a result of this dubious connection.

A quick and easy remedy for this issue is to add a fuse-protected, heavier gauge cable from the alternator directly to the battery under the hood. You can also clean all your bulkhead connectors and seal them up with dielectric grease to keep moisture and dirt out. It's not that easy to do well, as these are small parts with male and female connectors.

There are other methods explained in greater detail on Madd Electrics website.

I had redline convert mine to a volt guage and just connected the 2 sides of the guage wires together. Along with the rest of the bypss procedure.

what alternator would you recommed 69 dodge 383 eng. thanks

what is the other process of conversion.

anyone able to feed all the car load demand at the minimun speed as posible... better if at iddle. I use to set the 45 amps borderline on non AC cars and 50-55 amps on AC cars, but AT IDDLE. However I set these borderlines, the more, the better.

I'm a stockish guy. Tuff Stuff offers good 100 amps options. Recently PowerMaster is offering good options on stock units rated 95 amps recently ( rated 65 amps at iddle )

and ONCE AGAIN... no need to bypass the ammeter. Trust me everything will be safe for the ammeter with a powerfull alt.

Just need to bypass bulkhead throught the firewall OR if stock paths are in good conditions, just add a parallel path to the existant ones

Just read my thread about.

OR:
http://www.heritech.org/cuda/Charge.html


My car even is parted on a deep body job, has being a DAILY driver for years and I made this upgrade. Never have to worry anymore and I trust on my ammeter reading, which is85% of the time death centered. Deatn centered it means no load goping through. No load, no heat.

OF COURSE you need to check your ammeter conditions. After 50 years you can find anything. Be sure studs are tight to the ammeter internal shunt, isolations sheets to the cluster housing are perfect and all terminals clean and tight.

Electrical system needs to be checked just like your front suspension or timming setup. But EEEVERYBODY forget this, and then blame to the ammeter or whatever else

nacho, if wiring from scratch [think hotrod, custom harness, no bulkhead plugs], how would you tie in an amp meter ? same as the factory method plus using the bypass ?
volt gauge will also be in use.

Here's how I bypass the Ammeter without ripping the dash apart.
From the Battery stud back of alternator run a wire to the Battery stud of Starter relay using a fusible link at the relay.
I use 10 gauge wire with a 14 gauge fusible link.
Done.
Takes 50% load away from the ammeter gauge and if ever the gauge craps out you can still drive the car. Bonus is should the fields in the alternator reverse polarity,the fusible link will pop and not melt down the dash and wiring of car.
Optional is adding a voltmeter simply using a switch 12 volt source and ground anywhere to t he dash or whatever.

Which alternator? It depends on the amp load you want to power. Mopar and Denso alternators make a relatively low amount of power at idle. Like Nacho says, only about 65 amps at the most, which I find to be a generous number for that alternator at idle.

If you have a lot of electrical add-ons like a powerful fuel pump, high-powered stereo, A/C, Power windows and a adequate electric fan or fans; you can easily exceed 65 amps.

I had such add ons in my '70 E-Body. I bolted on a GM CS140 alternator that had been rewound and upgraded with heavy duty bridge rectifiers. It puts out over 100 amps at a low idle, and well over 200 amps at a fast idle. It is self regulating and very reliable. Here's a photo of it installed above my A/C compressor. Of course my wiring was upgraded to handle the amp load too.

There is nothing sacred about an ammeter. It is just a way to read the health of your charging system. The issue isn't the ammeter. It (danger) is, as described above, passing the entire electrical load of the car through a rather small connector in the dash, one that most people hardly know exists.
A voltmeter monitors system voltage and can tell you the health of the charging system if you care to learn a little. When the charging system is stable the voltage on most modern cars will be around 14.5. The voltage regulator adjusts the field current to maintain that voltage. When there is a heavy load the system voltage will drop as the alternator reaches the end of its capacity. This is quite rare except in the case of electric cooling fans which present a high load to the system whenever they are on. Lights are another big energy user that are on for long periods of time, although with many cars changing to LEDs this load can become very small. Big stereos may have momentary huge loads and steady state loads of up to 50% of the amp's capacity, in the case of Class AB amps (old school). Modern Class D amps can cut the static load quite a bit. My favorite electronic ignitions use 0ne amp per thousand rpm. I don't know amp draw of a fuel pump.

Any time you bypass some of the car's electrical load around the ammeter you are making the ammeter irrelevant. It needs to see the entire load to function properly.

IIRC the ammeter is really a voltmeter reading the voltage drop across a known resistance. But the problem isn't the alternator, it's the bulkhead connector. Removing the ammeter eliminates the need to run the entire electrical load through the firewall. When this is done, the easiest way to monitor electrical system health is to use a voltmeter.

R.

if no bulkhead, just replicate same stock config. All loads ( but starter motor ) must be taken from alt side of the ammeter game.

This is if a full load ammeter, because shunted ammeters are quite diff. Dunno if you are using stock or aftermarket ammeter

dogdays my friend, I'm gonna share this experience about Amm vs Volt.

Once I got a misterious discharging reading did need to rev it up quite high to be able to get charge reading. Took a multitester and while idling, getting discharge, the Multitester got me around 18-20 volts!!! how that was posible ?

then to be sure, I disconected the batt and engine stalled.

So which reading was the truth one ? Voltage or Amperage ? Both were truth, but the batt was getting discharged with an alt not able to hold the engine on, so the real deal was the ammeter reading.

The fail was one of the rotor vent vanes meeting with diodes bank/stator terminal while spining, causing a short.

If I had a voltimeter my mind was told me I was overcharging and not discharging! True both told me something was wrong, but the reality was the discharge deal.


EDITING to add info:
the ammeter is a magnetic gauge, doesn't read volñtage based on a resistance. The needle moves when gets magnetic fields variation with the load flow.

I like the method of adding a fused wire from the alternator to the starter relay; retains a stock look.
I prefer fuses to fusible links.
What size fuse would be best? rated @ alternator amperage, I'd guess?

actually the fuse link must be rated to the nominal car load and not the alt. The fuse link will blown on a short and the ONLY device able to feed a short is the batt not the alt.

If your car would get an alt without a batt, the engine will stall when a short comes in.

Several misconceptions about this, starting with the WRONG name given to the ammeter as ALTERNATOR gauge, where really is a BATTERY gauge. An Alt will never discharge because is not an accumulator. An alt is able toi feed or not, but never get Charged or Discharged. The batt IS the device which gets Charge or Discharge.

If you start up the engine and disconect the alt, the ammeter will show discharge. But if you disconect the batt, the ammeter will show NOTHING, simply a death centered needle, while your alt is sourcing the car/engine. That t5ells you what really mesures the ammeter.

If I were to use fuses I recommend 50 amp maxi-fuse.
Did that with my 83 Ramcharger

The fusible link "looks" stock and when at the starter relay,easy to get to just in case.Done to all my other Mopars 1966 and up.

there are about a dozen different ways of measuring current and displaying it on a gauge we'd call an ammeter.

ONE of those is to measure the voltage drop across a known resistor to infer amperage. Mopar eventually went to that style but not during the musclecar years.

the one we are familiar with uses magnetic fields.

there is nothing inherently wrong with an ammeter, however is may work. But the implementation does matter. Chrysler never built to last 50+ years so it is not surprising things need attention over time. All electrical connections need to be clean and tight. If they are not then heat gets generated. the more current flowing through that connection the hotter it will get.

Care to guess where the highest current flow is? Not the ammeter if you said that, the starter. That said, the ammeter does routinely get large amounts of current flowing through it so if those connections are not clean and tight then you will have heat related damage, maybe even a fire. I don't like that the charging feed into and out of the passenger compartment goes thru relatively small packard connectors that are exposed to the element. Clean them, use dielectric grease to protect them.

In addition to the bypass under the hood,I ran a wire from the starter relay with a fusible link again,and directly hooked up to the ammeter gauge.
This bypasses the bulkhead connector.
Next wire is from the discharge side of ammeter to the battery stud of alternator.
This still gives the ignition switch power and save your Nike walking shoes for another day.
I agree this makes the ammeter reading not accurate but still gives a "rough" idea.
I typically use a multi-meter to test the charging system if I think I have a problem.

I run a Powermaster 70 Amp roundback alternator with an Autozone VR706 electronic voltage regulator in my 68 Newport no problems.

Running relays for the headlights and converting all other lights to LED helps as well.
Hope this helps.

Ammeter won't get any current going through if the battery doesn't get discharged. Said that with a good alt, after you cranked up your engine to start it up, the alt ( a good one ) will recharge it in a minute or so depending on your battery reserve capacity and how long it took the cranking to start up the engine. Once is charged, you will get a death centered amm needle, once again, with the propper alt on car, able to feed the car demands. Once made thay you take care of the weakness of bulkhead and you are done! won't have to worry on anything else not even the ammeter itself. No reading on ammeter ( death centered needle ) no load going throught. No load there is IMPOSIBLE to get any kind of heating process. Of course, you need to keep all terminals clean and tight everywhere. But STILL with terminals loosen at ammeter studs, if the alternator is enough to feed everything, the power will never go through because all the power requirements are BEFORE the amm when alt is suplying. YOU CAN NOT to keep them loose because at some moment the loads will go throught, i.e. while cranking, to feed ign system ( not starter motor ), when you press pedal brakes or turning lights because Charging system is slower than the loads being sucked so batt will feed these for less than a second on first impulse, or the recharging process after crank up the engine, however STILL with these loosen, with a good alt, the ammeter won't get loads to heat it

Please don't discuss me this anymore because I have lived with this upgrade for some years with my car being a driver and using A/C quite often! I have seen this on my car daaaaay after daaaaay for seeeeveral years.

I think may have even a vid of my ammeter after crank up the engine and how it gets centered still adding loads ( lights and stuff like that )


What Chrysler made after 1975 is replace the full load ammeter for a shunted ammeter system which it works like somehow of remote ammeter. The ammeter got an amplifier coil to increase magnetic field able to move the needle with a minimal load going parallel to a shunt wire ( on engine bay ) offering a slight resistance to the charging system which allowed to get some minimal load going through the shunted ammeter. But not a resistor on ammeter really.

Ammeter NEVER READS VOLTAGE... just magnetic fields variation caused by electrons which feed the load requirements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunt_(electrical)#Use_in_current_measuring

"An ammeter shunt allows the measurement of current values too large to be directly measured by a particular ammeter. In this case, a separate shunt, a resistor of very low but accurately known resistance, is placed in parallel with a voltmeter, so that all of the current to be measured will flow through the shunt. The resistance is chosen so that the resultant voltage drop is measurable, but low enough not to disrupt the circuit. The voltage across the shunt is proportional to the current flowing through it, and so the measured voltage can be scaled to directly display the current value."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sensing#Shunt_resistors

"Ohm's Law is the observation that the voltage drop across a resistor is proportional to the current going through it.

This relationship can be used to sense currents. Sensors based on this simple relationship are well known for their lower costs, and reliability due to this simple principle. "