Maintain Your Ground!

Recent posts on here brought up the topic of maintaining a good ground on 6v starting systems. Today I had a graphic illustration of this working on my C. Decided to post about it to highlight a couple of points about "making sure you have a good ground."

1. Battery terminals - applying the standard terminal wire brush may be a start to cleaning them, but using a wire brush in a drill will get the job done a lot better. The terminals should have a bright silver sheen when done. A polished grey-black surface is just shined up oxidation, and it's death to conductivity!

 

2. Take apart the ground point connection on the steering post. Polish all the parts, including the battery cable connector. Polish the steering post - get down to bare metal.

 

3. Put this task on the annual maintenance list. I spent about 30 minutes doing this spring cleaning, but I'm old and slow! Seriously, should take more than 15-20 minutes.

 

I've had challenges with a sluggish starter motor on the C - not any more!

Brian, that makes great sense to me. The more surface area in contact, the more conductivity. I have one of the two-piece terminal/clamp cleaing brushes - it wouldn't touch the oxidation on the terminals, but it did seem to do a good job on the clamps. Like any other tool, I imagine that there are good and bad versions of this one!

One thing to not over look is solinoid .Problem on 14 for year or two .Replaced solinod and cranked like new.

Back about 1955, maybe 1958 when I started driving, my dad emphasized battery post cleaning and his method was using a sturdy short blade on the pocket knife to scrape all the gray oxide down to soft shiny lead. Same thing reaming the connector. I do have a combination cleaning tool that has a tapered reamer for the terminals and a steel scraper for the posts, but I think the good brushes clean better. The bristles tend to lay over in the brush, so reverse the direction of rotation if you can. That makes the steel bristles dig better for a while. The metal cased brushes may be sturdier. A brush that is easy to use isn't doing much cleaning.

Grounds ARE important, but in a starter circuit ALL connections are of equal concern. One of the fundamental theorems of electricity is that the same current flows in all parts of a circuit, that in the starter circuit being the battery posts, the wires, the connections to ground AND to the starter solenoid, the connection from starter solenoid to starter, the brush wires, the brushes, the commutator, the armature winding, AND the solenoid contacts. Failure in ANY breaks the circuit and prevents starting. They all have to be good to start, and from my dad's training, it was about a once a year project on a 6 volt car. That car, by 1959, had a 60 amp Bosch generator that had spent part of its life in a police cruiser so we could run more ham radio equipment. Long about 1962 my dad was getting on me to check the bearings and brushes, so I wrestled it out from beside the I-6 engine. When I dusted off the name plate I found it said, "check the brushes and repack the bearings every 1 million road miles." So I put it back and left alone. That car is long gone, but I do have that generator.

Gerald J.