Hi Richard,
When things suddenly all start to go bad in the electrical system, it's
usually because one of the grounds has become disconnected. You should
check the cable between the engine and the chassis (usually attached
between the bellhousing and the chassis at the Alpine transmission
crossmember mount) as well as the smaller grounds that attach to the
generator housing. The car running regardless of the ignition can also
be caused by a bad ground although it's not immediately obvious to me
how... The dash lights are grounded via the instrument cases, which are
grounded via the daisy-chain wires... but if those come loose, then the
dash lights would ground through the instrument temperature sender. This
would change the way the gauges worked depending on whether or not your
lights are on.
The parking lights turning on when you depress the brake pedal is
definitely a bad ground in the tailllight/brakelight circuit. When the
brakelight/taillight bulb case isn't grounded, applying 12 volts to the
brake light causes current to flow through the brake light filament,
then through the taillight filament in the same bulb, and from there to
the parking light filament (which is on the same circuit as the
taillight), and thereby illuminate all three. If you then turn on the
parking lights, you supply 12 volts to the taillight circuit which would
then cause the brake light and taillight to go out!
You're going to have to go through a lot of your car with alligator
clips and test lights (or a voltmeter). A problem with bad grounds
(especially the main engine/chassis cable) is that starting the engine
will cause high current to flow through all other possible ground paths
and that can wreck a lot of stuff. Been there, done that.
If you have any more specific symptoms I can try to make sense of them
for you if it will help localize the issues.
Good luck,
Theo
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