Thanks for the report leshby, it sounds as if all is well when you do things the Victa way. Putting random diodes between functions that are required to be electrically isolated is, basically, dumb.
Also, remember that each time you add an extra diode in series with the standard Victa charging circuit it causes an additional voltage drop of 0.7 Volts, which will decrease your battery charge rate a bit, but otherwise it has no effect. In this case, by using a diode ring rectifier (bridge rectifier) where there should be a single rectifier, it doubles that voltage drop to 1.4 Volts, which will have a noticeable effect on what you see on the ammeter. It would be a better job if you ignored the red wire from the engine (didn't connect it at all), and just connected the yellow wire to the same place you connected the alternator wire from the Briggs: the terminal on the end of wire 6. At the same time you could replace the bridge rectifier with a single diode, as shown on the wiring diagram. If you did all that, it would work exactly the way Victa intended, with no extra voltage drops. Of course the headlight circuit would work too. However until or unless you do that, you will get some kind of charge from the way you have it wired, it just won't be much.
And of course the safety circuits will work, now that you have wired them the way the diagram shows, without various diodes shorting circuits to each other.
Looking on the positive side, your mate may not be a great sparky, but he's obviously a good mate. And now you've learned quite a lot from sorting it all out afterwards.
I'll close this thread. If anyone needs to post to it, just send a PM to a moderator.
