A friend of mine has a 67 Camaro with a 327 that spent 11 mos in body/paint.
They hardly ever started it.
He got it back and now there are problems.
It now has some sort of short or voltage leak because a pretty fresh battery was just killed in one night of sitting.
They took off all the lights and grill and stuff like that.
Does that sound like a good place to start troubleshooting?

Anyone have a fool proof troubleshooting method they use?

You might try disconnecting the heavy wire to the alternator and see if it still has the problem. A bad diode in the alt will do that. If you need a test tool, solder a couple wires to a 1156 type taillight bulb (or a headlight) and connect it in series with the battery (between either of the battery posts and the cable that usually connects to it. If it lights, there's a problem. If it's not the alt, start pulling fuses and see if it goes out.

You might try disconnecting the heavy wire to the alternator and see if it still has the problem. A bad diode in the alt will do that. If you need a test tool, solder a couple wires to a 1156 type taillight bulb (or a headlight) and connect it in series with the battery (between either of the battery posts and the cable that usually connects to it. If it lights, there's a problem. If it's not the alt, start pulling fuses and see if it goes out.

Good advice just make sure you close the door each time or pull the fuse that runs the dome light. :)

Jeff

You might try disconnecting the heavy wire to the alternator and see if it still has the problem.

Just be sure not to let that red wire touch anything metal or ZZZZAATTT :clonk:

Mike, you have 2 posts for the same problem. It makes it harder for people to follow and help when they have to chase down whats going on between posts.

So what we did, was the probe light trick.

We connected the probe in series with the positive terminal of a different battery that wasn't dead. The light glowed bright.
None of the fuses being removed stopped the glowing light. Not until we unplugged the voltage regulator.

So I realize that it may not be the voltage regulator that has caused the problem but we changed it out anyway. We ran out of time so we have the car's battery on the charger and we will continue tomorrow.

Maybe, just maybe, its the voltage regulator.

We did test it again but that was after we put the battery we used back into the vehicle it came out of. We weren't sure that it was not measuring a current draw from the vehicle that the battery was now in. We had jumper cables to the battery cables on the camaro. The Camaro's battery was diconnected and the jumper cables were going from the trucks' battery to the battery terminals of the Camaro.
The light still glowed but not sure if we were testing only the Camaro's circuits.