Disclaimer: I have no history of working on vehicles other than a few oil changes and some easy v8 work back when I was a kid. Apologies if I am not calling parts by their name. I have been doing all this work by myself with YouTube as my backup and a lot of old threads on this forum. I will give some backstory to the Polaris here.

A buddy of mine had a Polaris Magnum sitting in his back yard that he claims would never run again (his mechanic told him this like decade ago). I decided to pull it out and check it out. I Couldn't tell what was wrong with it but my buddy said that the battery would always die on him when he was running the lights and then he couldn't start it again. Since it has a pull-start I just removed the battery and pull started it with some fresh gas and it fired right up. Then I decided to start checking out everything else and see what was up with it.

The first thing I wanted to check was for fuel, spark, and air (common theme I saw on YouTube videos so I mimicked them) . I noticed was that there was zero gas in the tank. After adding a little bit of fresh gas I noticed that the valve underneath to cutoff the fuel supply was leaking bad. It appeared the gasket was bad. After replacing it I had no issues. The second thing was when I went to check the spark plug the wire that goes into the rubber shoe was ripped off the end of the shoe and had been jammed back in with one or two strands of wire making contact inside the shoe. So I replaced this whole assembly. Then I did an oil change with filter, topped off the reservoir for the radiator and fired it up for a drive.

It appears to be running good. No issues bogging down or anything like that. The only concern I had was the carb was leaking gas out the very bottom nipple. I read that it could be debris so I decided to take the carb out and clean it up this morning. I put it all back together and thankfully it still runs with no issues. I am still waiting to see if more gas leaks from the bottom as their was some decent grime throughout the carb.

Now onto my current dilemma. When I fired it up today I noticed the voltage regulator (didn't know it was called that at the time, thank you google image reverse search) was smoking. When I got closer I heard it popping and crunching. I removed it and saw there was like a black oil leaking from it. I hooked it back up except for the red and brown wire and checked it out with a multi-meter (first time using one of these). I noticed that it was bouncing between 0 and would get up to 18 or higher at times depending on if i was giving it throttle. The entire time this thing got HOT. Like burn your skin hot.

I went ahead and removed it and then put an order in for a new one which should be here tomorrow. My big question here is should I see a hot AND ground wire that runs from this to my battery or only a red wire that hooks up to the battery? I tried following everything and couldn't find a ground, but my battery has an extra red wire that I keep hooked up. I want to make sure I am hooking everything up correctly and not frying anything.i also tried looking at a wiring diagram, but that's kind of like gibberish to me as I have no prior experience with any of this...

Also, do I need to check the stater to make sure its not what fried my voltage regulator?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions please ask and I will answer them. This has been fun so far and would like to continue working on this thing until it's fixed up.