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Re: Dead Midget - Help!

To: Swift Justice <samesq@pacbell.net>
Subject: Re: Dead Midget - Help!
From: Scott Fisher <sefisher@cisco.com>
Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 17:45:07 -0700
Cc: valntine@ptd.net, "spridgets@Autox.Team.Net" <spridgets@autox.team.net>
Organization: Cisco Systems
References: <37458FCF.53A137E@postoffice.pacbell.net> <374595E8.E3C@ptd.net> <374596B1.A5A7CE4C@postoffice.pacbell.net>
Reply-to: Scott Fisher <sefisher@cisco.com>
Sender: owner-spridgets@autox.team.net
Swift Justice wrote:

> Car will not jump, or get power from another battery  The car is deader
> than a doornail.  There is no power going to anything, door buzzer, etc, even
> with another battery connected to the battery, or to the anothe5r ground on
> the body.  It's like there no battery or thecar is not getting any electrical
> contact through the battery at all.

Then that sounds like what's wrong. :-)  Of if not through the battery,
then it's not getting contact through one or more of the things the
battery connects to.

There's a series of free and simple (well, progressively more involved)
tests that'll help you when these are your symptoms:

1.  Check the ground and hot cable connections, both ends.  Make sure
that the ground strap to battery, ground to chassis, hot to battery and
hot to starter connections are all good.  (I had a Lotus Cortina that
liked to refuse to start sometimes, because the connector on the starter
was wonky.)

2.  Check the battery itself, by replacement.  I had one battery go bad
in my '74 Midget in such a way that even hooking it up to the tow
truck's super-duper charging system wouldn't send any juice across the
bad battery.  I usually swap in a good battery from a running car
("Honey, you going anywhere for a while? I need to borrow, uh, something
out of your car..." :-)  

Usually, if your battery goes flat,  test 1 won't do it by itself, but
if your cable connections are loose (or highly corroded, for that
matter), test 2 won't do it by itself either.  I do this test in this
order because if there's any juice left in your battery at all, test 1
will at least give you lights and maybe one or two cranks, sometimes
just enough to fire and then charge your battery.  And if you have to do
test 2, you'll at least know that the cable ends are solidly mounted to
their respective connections.

If both of these fail to get you any juice anywhere at all, you may have
an internally broken/corroded cable, either ground or hot.  That problem
presented itself in my '67 Alfa about two years ago.  Unfortunately,
we'd just gone through bad starter/battery drill on my wife's car, so
the first thing I did was install a rebuilt starter (at $160).  Didn't
work.  Bought a new battery (at $50).  Didn't work.  THEN I checked the
longish cable from the +ive end of the battery to the starter --
actually, I shorted the starter across the two poles and smoke came out
of the *middle* of the +ive cable.  Old cable, weakened by internal
breaks and corrosion, and I finally let the smoke out.

I then spent $6 on a new cable at Pep Boys.  Wish I'd done that first,
I'd probably still have the original starter and battery and would have
spent that $210 on something else...

Best of luck, and *please* let us know what the problem turns out to be!

--Scott Fisher
  Sunnyvale, CA

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