first things first, just finishing up the v6 MPFI to v8 carbed swap so the computer and wiring harness are out of the car. I am in the process of wiring in a tach, oil, water temp and volt gauges and rewiring half the ignition.

basically what happened is I tapped into a wire from the dimmer and ran power for the tach light and a seperate power wire for the other 3 gauges which i daisy chained together with both going to a common ground. everything on the car worked fine the first day, then the next when i go to try and drive it, none of the lights worked on the outside of the car.
I started to follow the wires to see if there was a short or something somewhere didn't notice anything right away then the outside lights started working again.
Now comes the best part! after starting and shutting the car off a couple times none of the electrical worked inside the car except the radio and the backlight on the tach but that wouldn't dim anymore. the power for the distributor and my starter switch (I rigged it so you press a button to start the car but the key still needs to be in run) are temporarily hooked into the fuse box in 2 places where it says 'ign'. I haven't been able to give it a full lookover since it was dark but any help or ideas of what might be going on here would be greatly appreciated.

 

Something is obviously flaky, but since you have been doing so much rewiring it's impossible to say if it's caused by your workmanship or by some of the original connectors being corroded or loose. I'm afraid it would require "hands on" inspection to get a hunch about what's going on.

 

I would disconnect anything tapped into this wire and never touch it again !!! Messing with the Dimmer for a power supply causes strange things to happen !

 

well luckily a while back I read a thread about always soldering all connections so I've been doing that. part of the problem was a blown fuse that i had overlooked in the dark so the gauges and backlighting all came back after that. then about 10 min later everything else started working again! very thankful for that but I am going to continue to investigate to try and find out what might have been the problem to prevent it from happening again in the future.
Also I forgot to mention, the guy that had the car before me had some shady wiring in there too so i believe that has something to do with it even though i went through and re-did anything he had done, although I'm sure I missed some of it. Thanks for the help guys!