Hi all; thanks everyone for your input.
I've followed everyone's advice. Before I did anything, though, I removed,
cleaned and tightened every battery connection (at the battery terminals,
the battery ground connection on the block, the connection at the solenoid,
etc.). Then I tried cranking the car. It was perfect (this is with the old
Volvo's battery still fitted). Then, although this was probably not
necessary, I turned on the headlights and went through the testing procedure
as
recommended by Randall (grounding the multimeter to the bulkhead/firewall,
except on the battery where I put the multimeter pins on the battery
terminals). 12V everywhere, no problem. I thought I'd cured it by re-making
one of
those connections, so I put the TR battery back on, made sure the
connections were immaculately clean again, and we were back on-fault, with no
cranking, no ignition light (actually, it did glow once). Foolishly, instead
of
then doing a bunch of tests, I took the battery out and put the old Volvo's
battery back in. Back to cranking perfection now.
Both batteries show 12V, which suggests to me that the TR's battery is not
faulty. This leads me to start thinking that wherever the bad connection
is, corrected itself a couple of times, coincidentally when I fitted the
Volvo battery.
I have to get back to work now, so no time to do any other tests until this
evening. In the meantime, I'll be driving myself nuts trying to figure out
if a battery can fail suddenly, while the engine is being cranked and
suddenly the ignition light goes out and the engine stops cranking, and also
even if that can happen then I'll be trying to figure out why the TR's
battery is still showing 12V.
Tonight, I'll put the TR battery back in, then do some tests. Weird.
Tim
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