BlackMage

Alright here goes. Hopefully simple repair.

Go to start my car and as soon as i go to crank, the starter clicks once, and then i lose ALL power to the car. I will then turn the key off and back on, and nothing, like someone pulled the battery out of my car. I pop the hood and check the terminals to see if they are loose and they are nice and tight and no corrosion. As I am standing there pondering what is wrong, power comes back randomly(i left the lights and fan on as a reference to see if power came back). I get back in the car and try to start it and the same thing happens, the starter clicks and i lose ALL power.

So i grab my volt meter and i start checking wires. (mind you this is in walmarts parking lot lol) I have good power all the way past the main fuse block under the hood and to the starter. I then start checking ground wires and i find that the small wire coming off the terminal that connects right in front of the battery to the frame is bad and i can barely get 1v out of it. I pull the wire and bolt off where its attached, clean it, and as i am screwing it back in the power is jumping on and off on the car. As soon as i get back in the car though, same thing happens and i lose power when i go to start.

So i start thinking i have a bad ground, i grab my jumper cables and ground from the negative terminal to the block with them and try starting the car, it actually cranked this time but then lost power. I then tried hooking the neg terminal to the frame(i hooked it up to one of the bolts on the strut tower brace) and the car fired up....

I drove the car home and when i got back i tried to start it (no jumper cables) and it would not start. So my question is, do i just have a bad ground to the frame from the battery? or is it going to be something deeper than this that i need to look into?

Thanks guys.

jjandascog

Sounds like a bad ground cable.....

smitty2919

Well at first glance of reading this, I would say it has something to do with a bad ground. You said you got closer when grounding to the block, but got it to fire up when gettting a (better?) ground going to strut bolt.

I would track down all the grounds and see if you find your culprit.

cliffyk

Did you check the battery voltage while cranking the engine, or do a high amperage draw down test?

A battery with a shorted or open/intermittent cell can behave in that manner--and go bad "right out of the blue", mine did on a Saturday morning's shopping trip after 2 or 3 prior stop/starts.

BlackMage

sorry i forgot to put that in there, the voltage dropped to 10.3v while cranking, so i figured the battery was still ok.

cliffyk

That's borderline on these newer cars. You need to do a 100A or better yet 200A+ (1/2 the CCA rating) load test on the battery just to be sure. HF has a good 100A tester that's almost always on sale:



And better yet a 500A tester that happens to be on sale:



I've got one of each, the 100A unit is 10+ years old, I've had the 500A tester for 3 or 4 year--it was $39.99 back then...

Hangwire

The Cliffster loves some Harbor Freight.

BlackMage

I'll see what I can come up with after work tonight. None the less though, would something like that kill the car completely for random periods of time where it seems like no power is getting to anything? And then just randomly turn the car back on?

swarthyfellow

not to thread jack, but can a loose battery cable (still in contact) cause the car to die like that too. I had the car die completely starting it a few times last week and the only thing i could find was that the cable was slightly loose. I tightened it and i haven't had a problem yet.. but its only been a few starts since then. I'm going on long trip back to school and don't want to have any issues. Should i check anything else?

BlackMage

Please start a new thread.