[TR] Electrical diagnosis: Update

Doug Mathews mathews at uga.edu
Mon Jun 14 09:45:42 MDT 2010


Before you go to all the trouble to put the suspect battery back in, 
take it down to Autozone or anywhere like that and they can load test 
the battery.  My truck's battery voltage was ok, but failed a load test. 
It was 8 years old.

Doug

On 6/14/2010 10:15 AM, KingsCreekTrees at aol.com wrote:
> 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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