Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback

I'm back working on the fuel/ignition problem. I group the two together because they're both controlled by the FAST controller.

The first thing I did was to move the wires that supply power to the controller to the battery side terminals. Instead of making several changes at once, I decided to take the car out and see if it had made a difference.

I had a difficult time getting the car to start. It didn't want to start unless I gave it at least half throttle. Then it didn't want to stay running unless I kept the RPM above 1100. It died on me several times and would not restart without pressing on the gas. I realize that it's abnormal to depress the gas pedal when starting a vehicle with fuel injection. I'm accustomed to doing it on carbureted motors and tried it out of reflex.

Frustrated with the way it was running I decided to reset the system. It seemed to have cured the starting problem. The car started easily and ran fine. It continued to behave until I got a few miles out of town. Then the problem from the other day came back.

I had been watching the digital volt meter readout on the FAST screen and it never showed any problem. Today I noticed that the ammeter in the dash was pulsing as I drove the car back home.

Suspecting a voltage regulator problem I removed it and cleaned up the ground connections. I had a spare regulator in the toolbox so I swapped it out also. The gauges showed a discharge when I restarted the car. Apparently the regulator was bad that was in the toolbox. I put the old regulator back on and started the car. It's charging again.

I didn't have enough time today to try other things, but I'll start making a list of which checks to do next.