The paint pen was easy and looks pretty good. Although now I want the chromed gauge cluster bezels.
I tried to hook up the factory tach. Melted the ground wire back to the splice. Looked and smelled way worse then what it wound up being though. The aftermarket tach was originally installed using the factory wiring. That worked just fine. I unplugged it and plugged in the factory tach. All was well with key on engine off. Engine fired right up but the tach never moved. After about 15 seconds I could see smoke coming from the tach harness. I shut off the ignition and yanked the hot side from the tach. It was certainly hot in more ways then one. After tracing the melted ground back to the splice I hooked up the aftermarket tach to the same wires and it still works. I then tried the v8 adapter piece alone and the car would no longer fire with it in place. The ground wire was getting warm just from cranking. I assume it's shorted to ground internally. I then tried the tach from my old Cobra and the car runs but the tach is inop. So back to the ugly column mounted tach again for now.
After all that my new stereo would not shut off consistently. After removing the key the radio would continue to play for anywhere from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Sometimes it shut off as it was supposed to. Most times it shut off between 1 and 2 minutes after the ignition was off. A few times it took almost 20 minutes. The kicker was it would always work correctly with a test light on the ignition wire to radio. As soon as I tested for power it would shut off. I cut the ignition wire to the noise suppressor and used a power probe to provide power on the output side of the suppressor. Same thing. It would not shut off. I went through and redid the ground wire just in case it was damaged. No change. I cut the noise suppressor wire supplying the radio and now it works correctly.
During the ground wire repair phase of this I also changed the ground at the alternator to a 6 gauge wire from a 16 gauge. I was using a common ground for the alternator , gauges and stereo. I separated them all by a foot or more. The alternator whine was maybe halved but still very prominent with this change. Once I fully cut the suppressor out it's now almost gone.
After 2 days of fiddling, melting wire the harness, and my dash now half apart I accidently on purpose sorda kinda fixed the alternator whine.
