Alright, well i took my car off the road for a couple weeks ot get some stuff done to change the clutch and relocate my battery tot he trunk, and a few other things.
The first start up was GREAT, no hesitation no problems at all! Later on after i pickup my girlfriend from her house, i go to start my car and it sounds like quiet machine gun firing as the starter atempts to turn over the engine, but fails. So i push my car out of her drive-way and roll down the hill and drop the clutch to force it to start.
Later that night we went to the movies and after the movie there was some hesitation when trying to start, but thankfully it did.
I used
4awg Power wire running from the front of the car to the battery in the trunk, and
8awg Ground wire, bolted to the inside of the trunk for a good ground.
The battery is practically brand new, it's a Kinetik HC 1400 and i bought it in December so there's no way it's a dead powercell.
Now my question is, what could be causing this? I suspect that it's just the death of my Alternator, and it's just sheer coinsidence that it happened right when i relocated the battery.
Or did i manage to relocate the battery wrong? A ground is a ground, is a ground right? I shouldn't need to wire the ground from under the hood where the battery used to be, all the way to the trunk should I?
Thanks in advance for any help, it's appreciated. Hopefully i can get a quick responce since i need my car for Monday.
Battery cable is way to small!!! Ground should be at least 2 ga and pos no less than 1 ga.You will have no problem with this size! You can not go to big.
pics of ground location? did you sand the paint off?
and bigger cable, 2awg sounds fine but since your ground is not very long i would just spend the extra and get 1/0
Stephen wrote:pics of ground location? did you sand the paint off?
and bigger cable, 2awg sounds fine but since your ground is not very long i would just spend the extra and get 1/0
Yes, i sanded the paint off very well, No i currently don't have a picture of the ground location but i can get one soon.
Do you think you could explain why i should go larger then 4awg? Does it have to do with current draw through a small wire? Thanks for the quick replies guys!! I'll get the ground picture posted up in a couple minutes.
Thrice . wrote:Stephen wrote:pics of ground location? did you sand the paint off?
and bigger cable, 2awg sounds fine but since your ground is not very long i would just spend the extra and get 1/0
Yes, i sanded the paint off very well, No i currently don't have a picture of the ground location but i can get one soon.
Do you think you could explain why i should go larger then 4awg? Does it have to do with current draw through a small wire? Thanks for the quick replies guys!! I'll get the ground picture posted up in a couple minutes.
This. Also, I'd do a good ground from the engine block to the body if you haven't done so.
ground is probably fine, but I've had issues with my grounds back there.
last summer I threw my system together last minute for a comp, with 2 runs of +ve 1/0 from the front battery to my rear odyssey 2150, and 2 runs of -ve 1/0 grounded to the passenger seatbelt bolt (under the seat). managed a 146.8.
a month ago I threw everything back in for another comp, this time losing the rear grounds (no buss-bars, had too many strings to hook to the terminal) and stringing 2 runs of -'ve 1/0 right from the front battery to the rear battery. I gained 0.9db changing absolutely nothing else. too substantial to overlook.
I know several people who absolutely hate grounding to body panels, as pinch welds aren't great for conducting current. they always seem to recommend grounding to the strut towers, or seat belt attachment points, but it seems that even those aren't always wonderful, either.
have you had your battery and/or alt tested to see if one of those is an issue?
is it possible to re-install your battery under your hood and see if anything changes? not sure if you kept your factory wiring when you relocated, but it's something you could do if you aren't close to a place that tests batts.
GAM (The Kilted One) wrote: if you think you're that much better than them because you're "correct" I hope your progeny don't turn out as screwed up as yourself.
I know this is will be a argument of how I did mine, because I'm sure some will chime in saying they've just grounded to the strut tower and have had no issues etc... Yet my method has given me no troubles for the 2 years I've had it done, using the same battery I've had in the car(optima red top) and well I guess I cant say I haven't had any issues, I've had one issue because I used 8g audio wire from local audio shop for my power wire to the fuse box and after 4 months the wire was toast and had to replace that with a heavy duty 8gauge battery cable I got. Otherwise I have had 0 problems with mine.
What I did was got 2gauge heavy duty marine battery cable off eBay(Was like $50 for 25ft red, 25ft black)
Anyway I ran my power wire from the battery up to the starter.
I also ran my Ground from the battery in the trunk up to the engine.. but not that simple.. I made it sort of a bolt in section of ground wires. Grounding to the body every so often throughout the car for the best possible ground with minimal resistance.
From the ground on the battery in the trunk, I went to one of the rear seat belt studs and grounded the wire there, from there I went to the bolt holding the driver side seat belt retractor to the body sandwiching the ring terminal between the bolt and the retractor, After that i went to the G304 Ground bolt beside the driver seat, then in through the firewall to the G102 Ground bolt on the frame rail, and finished by next going to G110/G112 ground bolt on the engine block..
Possibly overkill maybe, but I've had no problems and its all hidden well.
Reason I did this was from
HanzenRider's how-to posted on the forum and also a conversation I had with Ron(Shifted)
Quote:
slwiggins03 (9:08:29 PM): in your battery wiring.. the ground goes from battery to body ground to engine ground correct?
slwiggins03 (9:09:10 PM): "your" meaning in Jbodies
zibelthiurdos (9:09:52 PM): yeah, but its all in the same wire stock, so really it goes from battery to body and battery to engine
slwiggins03 (9:10:07 PM): right
slwiggins03 (9:10:37 PM): now when I relocate to the trunk i need to continue that same path correct? i cant just go to body ground after removing all the stock battery cables correct?
zibelthiurdos (9:11:23 PM): no, you can't just ground to a stud in the trunk, you really need to have good grounds with low resistance and as many as you feel like, but at a minimum those two
slwiggins03 (9:11:33 PM): right
slwiggins03 (9:12:43 PM): now currently.. i have a 4 gauge ground going from the battery in the trunk, grounds on strut tower, then grounds to seat belt retractor bracket, then grounds to stock battery tray, then engine. no problems. but tommorrow i am redoing it with 2 gauge.. now.. 2 gauge is a bit bigger and I rather not run it all the way through like i did the 4 gauge for cleanliness..
slwiggins03 (9:14:08 PM): you think, if i ran a ground from the battery to the back seatbelt stud. then going from the body ground on the frame rail under the stock battery tray(planning on removing battery tray and have easy access to it) and going to the engine. would you think that would still give me a good ground? or just run the cable all the way through again?
zibelthiurdos (9:15:38 PM): your car is a big resistor, if you do that you'll have issues with your battery draining when the car is just sitting
slwiggins03 (9:16:10 PM): thats what i was worried bout
slwiggins03 (9:16:13 PM): damn
zibelthiurdos (9:17:03 PM): also, bigger wire doesn't mean better ground, 4 gauge is plenty and if you are having issues i'd get better quality cable rather than bigger
slwiggins03 (9:17:52 PM): not having issues. going to 2 gauge due to better quality cable and the protection coating is nicer.. plus i have plenty of it so i can run it nicely.. unlike i did with the 4g
slwiggins03 (9:20:55 PM): so, then anyone relocating a battery would have to do the same thing? how do so many kits only sell like a 2ft cable for ground.
zibelthiurdos (9:21:56 PM): works great on steel frame and big old cars (80's and earlier) that the kits were originally intended for
slwiggins03 (9:22:05 PM): gotcha
slwiggins03 (9:23:21 PM): well i appreciate it. ******** was telling me he didn't want to do the cable all the way through and I was dead sure you'd need to and he was saying he'd just make a bolt in the back for the body ground and somehow do it...
zibelthiurdos (9:24:06 PM): it'll work, but he'll have battery draining issues
Lanman31337 - Cavfire wrote:Thrice . wrote:Stephen wrote:pics of ground location? did you sand the paint off?
and bigger cable, 2awg sounds fine but since your ground is not very long i would just spend the extra and get 1/0
Yes, i sanded the paint off very well, No i currently don't have a picture of the ground location but i can get one soon.
Do you think you could explain why i should go larger then 4awg? Does it have to do with current draw through a small wire? Thanks for the quick replies guys!! I'll get the ground picture posted up in a couple minutes.
This. Also, I'd do a good ground from the engine block to the body if you haven't done so.
x2
i would ground the the rear seatbelt bolt to, the metal looks weak. at least when you ground to a seatbelt bolt you know it has a thick piece of metal behind it.
ok, so the ground cable has to run all the way up to the front of the car and ground to the seatbelt bolt, then old battery tray, then engine? This is all on one cable?
Hmm..from the writeup, it says 4awg cable should be sufficient for both power and ground. looks like i'm off to buy another 20 feet of 4awg ground.
I wouldn't ground to the seatbelt bolt. It's a realy crappy place to ground to.
Ok so the battery drain issue has been fixed, but the starter can't seem to draw enough current to start the engine even when i charged the battery to 100%. So it looks like i'm going to have to go with 1/0awg power wire, unless someone thinks it could be something else?
4 gauge is plenty for the starter draw. Have you had your battery load tested?
Lanman31337 - Cavfire wrote:4 gauge is plenty for the starter draw. Have you had your battery load tested?
No, but it's capable of 1400 cold cranking amnps. You'd think it would work fine. It worked great under my hood since december! all i did was lengthen the power cable, make it thicker, and add more grounds. How can that make it worse lol.
Put a meter on the amp and crank it. Let me know what the voltage drop is. Next, get me some resistance numbers from the body where you're at to the negative terminal, and also the engine block to the negative battery terminal.
What kind of 4gauge are you using? Odds are if you are using audio or fine strained cable.. it cant carry the load. thats what happened to the small 8gauge wire i had going to the fuse box when i first did mine..
I'm throwing up the bs flag. Strand count is purely flexibility, not the ability to handle current.
Could very well be wrong, to me it just seemed like it may not be able to carry the amps.. but that was the only conclusion i could come up as to why i smoked the audio cable 8 gauge i had for the fuse box cable..
Actually the electrons moves over the strands not through them so the more strands the more current.
Physics class is full of myths?
Let me rephrase this a little differently. Using your method, the smaller the wires, the better it is. Ok so let's say jeffrey uses a massive single 4 inch diameter wire (using as an example) 12 foot long. I have an approx. 1533 square inches of surface area. Now you say hey, I'm going to use 2 2 inch wires in mine. You end up with 1520 square inches of area. Hmm, slightly less. Is it going to make a difference at 250 amps? Nope. Is the thinner wire going to be more flexible? Yes.
I have been talking with SweetnessGT about this and we were going over the readingsI was getting at the battery, starter, and the resistance of the wire. We came to the conclusion that the 4awg wire just isn't big enough to pull the current. I'm installing my 1awg wire tonight, and i will update on how it goes and if the problem gets fixed.
TheSundownFire (JBO Shortbus) wrote:Physics class is full of myths?
from what I remember reading, skin effect doesn't affect us 12V guys. it's only for AC current.
since resistivity is a function of cross-sectional area per unit length, a solid rod of copper with the same diameter as a stranded wire (made with the same material) should theoretically have less resistance (and therefore lower voltage drop) than stranded wire. in other words, it should have significantly more current-handling.
so if 4ga wire with high strand count has the same cross-sectional area as 4ga wire with less strand count, theoretically the only real difference should be flexibility. and having played with welding cable, flexibility is something to consider.
the big question we should ask - for the different brands of wire we use, are cross-sectional areas the same? I would argue no, but are differences even worth worrying about?
GAM (The Kilted One) wrote: if you think you're that much better than them because you're "correct" I hope your progeny don't turn out as screwed up as yourself.
