Thread: Battery kill switch removal help....?

glad I could show you the light lol

I believe battery belongs up front unless there's absolutely no room for it, you loose a bit of power running that long ass cable..

I work on boats and I'm always fixing people's wiring lol

Main reasons for relocating the battery are to make room for other things up front (air intake usually) or to balance out the weight by putting the battery in the passenger/rear corner. If neither of these is a factor, then just undo it. The purpose of the battery is to start the car, after that, the car runs off the alternator. The heaviest load is starting the car, the starter is on the engine, so keeping the battery local is best all around.

Agreeing with @SE-RMonkey on looking for exposed wiring, I'm guessing that the cable was rubbing against a sharp edge and over time the insulation wore through. There will likely be black marks from arcing, but unless you can look at both sides of the metal you may not see it, but the cable insulation will likely be deformed from heat at that point so if you do pull the cable out, you should see this pretty easily.

Any spot where cabling passes through should have a rubber gromet or something similar to keep rough edges away from the wiring, ideally. There is a lot of vibration at play, and over time will definitely cause problems.

There's no rubber grommets like you said there should be, but there's also no problems w/ the wire all the way back. Just popping panels and checking. It appears to be a very rugged and thick wire. I just drove the car for 60 miles and it ran perfect

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink!

What? I did what everyone said to, inspect the positive cable from the trunk to the engine bay

"Weight distribution"

OK, I was lying awake over the weekend and my brain was refusing to shut down, and I started thinking of this mail thread and realized that I had screwed up. If the old breaker was popping, then the current overload that would have tripped this would have been AFTER the breaker. The battery wire leading to the trunk could NOT have been the culprit, because a short on that cable would not have had current passing through the breaker.

Now, the old breaker may just have been failing and tripping prematurely. Once a breaker has popped a few times, it isn't unusual for it to take less of an overload to pop again in the future, hard to say at this point why that may have started happening, but it obviously needed replacing.

As for the rubber gromets to protect the cable, I'm sure that a lot of installs don't have these, and many installs will never have a problem. But it just adds a bit of extra protection to the cable, so if you have a chance to add some protection, do it.




I'm still trying to wrap my head around this issue. I need to clarify, you said you would park the car, shut it off, and then all the power was cut. Did that happen RIGHT AFTER shutting off the car (your radio and lights instantly died, etc), or you got out of the car, came back, put the key in, heard chimes, went to start, then DEAD. Or something else. I'm curious on when exactly power went out, so try to figure out what may have been tripping the breaker.

My gut says that when you tried to start the car would be when this would pop, as the starter draws a LOT of current, but it isn't clear from how you worded that.

Also, hooking those three lines together with a bolt should have been no different than the distribution block, electrically speaking. The block is just a strip of metal with threaded holes for easily adding new lines to. So this seems to indicate that something is still intermittently shorting out, somewhere, but wherever this is, it is happening BEFORE getting to any fuses or they would have blown first.

Hey jimbo - here's how it WAS happening about once a week (but hasn't happened since I put in the distribution block) - car starts up and drives fine, I pull up to my destination, and shut the car off, and its all dead. Because the dome light comes on in my car when you remove the key, and it wouldn't. I go to turn on the accessories again or anything, all dead. So it was always when shutting the car off. So I had to pop the hood either then or right before I came back again to flip the kill switch over again in the engine bay. Then the switch part itself (the actual switch on the unit) broke, meaning the next time it killed power, I'd be screwed, and that's what finally happened which led to the removal and now all seems perfect.

OK. I'm going over electrical flow in my head here, but the only way that this makes sense is if the breaker had already popped BEFORE you turned the car off. Let me explain...

The breaker I believe had the battery cable on one side going to the trunk, and the other two wires on the other side. Looks like you deleted the pic of the breaker from this thread (?) so I can't verify that, but it makes sense. So, the breaker would have been good when you started the car, since the battery is required for that. Once the car was started, it was being powered from the alternator. Alternator power would have been running through the fuse panel before tying in to the other red wire that went to the breaker, that would have kept the battery charged.

Once the car is running, the breaker could have tripped, and you never would have known without checking it. If the breaker had tripped while starting the car, it never would have run at all, so the starter (heaviest load on battery) would have successfully started the car, gotten the alternator running producing power, before the breaker tripped. With the car running, minimal current would have been passing through the breaker (compared to starting).

Since no fuses were popping, I keep coming back to the wire that went to the starter motor. There is no fuse on this line, it is a straight run to the battery. The only thing that is making sense is that this line was drawing more power than the breaker could handle, but the breaker was taking just slightly longer to trip than the starter required to get the car started. The other possibility is that this line between starter and battery may be shorting against something while driving, a loose connection, etc.

jimbo, pic of the original breaker/kill switch is still in the first post:



The starter cable and fuseable link cable are bottom right, positive battery cable top left