My 67 has been running great all Spring and Summer. Went to the gym this morning and when i came out to start up the car it was dead! No radio, clock nothing. Went to check it out and noticed the positive terminal was hot! Disconnected the terminal put it back on and everything was back to working. Drove it home and all the gauges looked normal. If it happens once, you know it's going to happen again. Thought I would ask here first before tearing into it and chasing ghosts. any suggestions?

Bob

 

Did you leave the key on the on position?

 

I had a similar problem a couple of weeks ago. Went to start the car and it went dead immediately. The positive side was hot and it melted the positive and negative cables. Turned out that the positive cable was against the exhaust manifold and shorted out when I turned the key. I thought I was going to burn the car down before I got the cable off the battery.

 

The only way a battery terminal or cable is going to get hot is when there is a lot of current passing through it. For current to pass, a ground is needed. What Gerald57 said: inspect every inch of that cable, and if ok, inspect the rest of the wiring, looking for intermittent shorts to ground, which is most likely the issue here.

 

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll start with the cable.

Bob

 

That issue was simply a loose terminal connector. I wouldn't make any more of it than that but inspecting the cables and test the cable resistance end to end and resistance to ground is peace of mind.

If it is a infrequent problem sometimes you have to wait for a complete component failure to find the problem anyways. Intermittent shorts can be very difficult to locate but a short to ground would be making some telltale heat to locate it.

W/o the engine running the only power source is the battery and this is delivered by the positive battery cable and then a large size red wire to the distribution post on the fender somewhere so that covers what you experienced - only 2 items/wires to inspect on the positive side.
Now the negative cable could do this also but no other single wire on the battery negative side could do what you experienced other than just the negative cable itself. All other negative wires are paralleled to the frame so a bad connection would only de-energize one item.

What I'm saying is you have a minor problem and nothing to panic about. Something not many owners do but can be very helpful is resistance checks of all the wire terminations. Yes lift the battery terminal connections and measure resistance across each wire termination. Pos cable across starter terminal to positive supply wire to distribution block/post. Across distribution block positive supply wire to each wire connected there. Measure resistance across ground terminal on block to the frame wire/cable. Then across that cable/wire to the frame and any other ground wire connected to the frame.

I think that covers it.
Have fun Bob.

 

Which kills me when some here claim they just leave the negative battery cable loose enough to pull off when stopped to act as a battery disconnect - I've heard few things so brain-dead. Doesn't it make sense that that beefy battery cable is meant to flow as much current as possible and requires 100% solid contact at the battery post to do so ?

 

Cardo0. Thank you for that! Everything looks good now. Nothing looked out of place. But I loosened and tightened everything back up. Hopefully it wont happen again.

Bob