This car was put on hold for some time in the middle of wedding plans and moving into a new house, but it's back on the front burner now. I confirmed that unplugging the alternator eliminated the short, and dropped it for a bench test at Advance. It tripped the circuit breaker on their test machine three times, so I dropped it off last week at an alternator/generator repair shop. Hopefully I'll know exactly what went wrong sometime today.

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1987 Mercedes 300D