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Any ideas based on the pictures? I seem to have some more spare time since we can barely leave the house. Lol

Here is a bit from Motor's Manual, 15th edition on the generators and some troubleshooting suggestions. Believe your car would fall under the GAR description but if it has more poles maybe CO. Looking at your photos and the fact I think your symptom would fall under fully charged battery but high charging rate, one of the excess voltage troubleshooting tips is a shorted wire. You might investigate the connections on the voltage regulator to make sure one of the strands has not grounded out to the case or another terminal and is allowing the resistors in the regulator to be bypassed.

The charging circuit diagram is from a 35 120 book. I do not have a 36 manual to know if the 35 circuit is similar to 36 but at a quick comparison to a 37 charging circuit it may be if your regulator internally looks anything like the illustration and also contains the circuit breaker assy. The main difference might be 36 is mounted directly onto the generator and the 37 regulator is on the firewall.

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This is good stuff, thank you. I'll look at the hanger spring as well since I'm thinking it may have been messed with.

I keep reading about adjusting the third brush. How would I go about doing that?

Usual third brush adjustment is that moving in the direction of armature rotation increases charging rate (amperage).

No clue on your generator but reading thru the charging description of a couple of systems with third brush generators Packard used in the 30s, the third brush was not adjustable and was fixed to give around 23 amps output.

Looking at your photos I don't see anything obvious I would consider being an adjustment mechanism to move the brush so it may be one of the fixed types or maybe not enough detail or the right view in the photos. One of the guys more familiar with that era 120s could probably tell you if it adjusts and where and what to look for in the way of adjustment screws or a brush sliding mechanism.

Were it my car, I'd probably send the generator and regulator to one of the vendors who specialize in this work.

37 Packards 115C & 120C used a 3 brush generators with a non movable third brush, known as split field generators. I don't know for sure if 1938 6 & 120 generators were the same.