It's a brand new battery.
I didn't notice what the ammeter registered, if anything. The prime concern at the time was preventing a fire.
There definitely was smoke. It fogged up the gauge cluster until the vacuum from the wires sucked the smoke back into themselves.
I refaced the gauges a few years ago and put them in plastic bags. They shouldn't be the problem.
What do you mean by taking one area at a time and verifying it?
I don't know if the ignition system is working. We bypassed it.
Could I have the switch wired wrong? There were no directions as to which wire went where on the switch, and I checked some topics here and the consensus was that there's no particular terminal on the switch for each wire. I have the "hot" wire on the middle (lowest) terminal and other things on the other two.
