New battery and starter last year but seemed to need to jump it if set for any length of time and volt gauge always seemed a little low.

Jumped guage at alternator this morning and saw 20-25 amps no matter the revs or load and turning on all accessories got voltage to drop... 12... 11... 10.5...

Decided to just replace alternator. Course once at Autozone "whats it from?" which I dont know and the old unit was a generic chrome alternator with no numbers at all. They let me open boxxes till I found one that seemed to be the same. #1100218 63A for $50 which seemed fine. (I think its 71-85 Chev Pass.)

Got it installed and ran for 2-3 minutes, all seemed good, amp guage showed same 20-25 at idle but run it up 2,000-3,000 and WOW 60+ amps... then dropped to 40 which I figured was good... battery is charging... and dont need 60 now...

Then SMOKE from the dash...!!!

Turned key off... motor continued to run...

Luckily I had the air filter off and threw a rag over the carb intake to kill it and got the positive battery cable off quickly as well....

After smoke cleared I crawled around under the dash and cant find any.. "damage".... but something was smoking and Ive driven the car since 1999 and never seen smoke under the dash before....

Sat and looked at it once the smoke cleared and I was sure the thing wasnt on fire... Touched the alternator, dang thing was too hot to touch... touched the valve covers.. .they were hot.. but I could touch them... ??

The car is equiped with a volt meter not an amp gauge.
The amp readings I mentioned are from a Sears unit that is a temp hook up and can read over a 100 amps.

I've left the battery cable disconneted and the battery on a charger. Hoping the battery was so low that the new alternator was maxxing out at 60+ amps and the volt gauge of something in the ignition switch couldnt handle that much amps, and will be fine in the morning with a fully charged battery?

But Ive had car fires before so this has me very nervous!

Any ideas???????????
HELP!?!?!  

Too much voltage. Replace the regulator for starters. Sounds like it went tits up and is telling the alternator to run at full all the time.  

Internal regulator...
but yes pulled the new 63 amp alternator and replaced with a 37 amp... all is now fine.. .cept it seems to have fried something in my ignition switch...
Streetrod so I have to guess that the tilt column is Nova????
How do you remove the ignition lock... and the switch... at this point Id like to replace both.......  

smike from the dash is never a good thing, glad to hear it's fixed.