Now I know this is a wild goose chase, but something's drawing too much current from the battery. I have no idea what it is, but it may be the headlights, so I'll start there. How much voltage/amperage should they be drawing?

You know the smaller red wire that comes off the battery, attaches to that little bolt inside the battery compartment, then another wire attaches to that and goes off somewhere? It got hot enough to melt the plastic surrounding the bolt. It produced quite a smelly... umm.. smell. Every so often I notice the smell again and it really bothers me because I know what that smell means. Yes I do have an amp, but all that has been disconnected, including all the power lines, since I noticed this, and it hasn't helped any. Brand new battery. Occasionally the alternator light comes on and the voltage on the gauge drops down below 12. It doesn't usually last too long like that, but I do wonder why it does that. It's prone to do it when the headlights are on, which is what's making me think it could be one of those, plus one is brighter than the other.

I originally had my amp wired into that little bolt, and the amp power line got grounded when i had the old battery in, and produced a little smoke, but it didn't appear to melt the plastic housing. Do these lines normally get hot? I know they don't normally melt anything, but maybe if it was weakened by the amp's line getting grounded? Right now there's melted plastic all over the line, under normal circumstances would the line get hot enough to keep producing the melted plastic smell?




[Modified by Enkil, 4:21 AM 7/19/2003]

 

Wires getting hot = bad! Electrical burning smell = bad! Wires should never get hot or smell from current running through them - unless they are under rated, but the guys who put your car together probably used the right size wire.

Sou-nds to me like you have an intermittent short - might be a bit of a challenge to hunt down but its important that you do. A few days ago a guy posted that he was driving down the street and his dash caught on fire because he had a short. Carry a fire extimguisher with you at all times just in case!

Any wires that have insulation melted off should be replaced - if the insulation melted off in one spot it could have melted off somewhere else too, probably in a spot you cannot see. This means your battery line could be intermittenly shorting to ground. Example - you are driving and you hit a bump, the exposed wire bounces and breifly touches ground.

Not sure about your year vette but are you saying you have more than one line coming off your battery? I'm pretty sure you should only have one thick wire running from your battery to your starter solenoid. From there a smaller red wire goes through a fuseable link (small cylinder thingie) then feeds the rest of the vehicle. Another smaller wire attaches to the solenoid on a different post. If I am wrong please let me know.

Check to see if your alternator smells like the burning smell you described. Alternators usually fail open but you never know, maybe it is dying on you...

Hunting time - probably your best bet is to first disconnect the battery, physically look at all the wiring through the car and replace anything that is questionable. Then pull out all your fuses and power up. Put in one fuse at a time and see if any particular fuse causes problems. Buy a decent multimeter too, no shop should be without one. Good luck let us know how it goes!

 

Anytime you add somthing to the circut (i.e. amp) and short the new component out then chances are you shorted out something else in the circut also.

Boofers had some great sugestions.....I'd look into it.
Good luck. I see a fire extinguisher in your future :yesnod:

 

Your Batt pos lead may be loose or have high resistance. This would cause the small wire to take all of the load.
Double check the batt connections and the conections at the starter.

:cheers:

 

The car starts very quickly every time so I'm not so sure if that's it, but I'll check into it. I think it might simply be the connection itself -- I haven't had time to properly re-splice the cables together after the plastic melted on/around the wires. I'm thinking, maybe it's just got a really bad connection, and that part of it heats up, causing the wires to heat up right around the bad connection. I'll get to that tomorrow, and hopefully that'll fix things...

However, I'm in the mood to tear stuff up, and I was planning on redoing my interior anyways, so... Tomorrow I'll start with the "Interior Delete" option I've seen some other forum member have.

 

It turned out to be the bad connection between the wire running right off the battery, and the line running to (presumably) the fuse box. The high resistance was causing the line to heat up right there, and the burning smell was the plastic that had already melted onto the wires getting hot again. Cut off the bad part and spliced the wires together and the wires don't get warm at all.

 

:hurray: :hurray: :hurray: :hurray:
Buy a fire extinguisher anyway......not a bad investment.

 

Phew. I was thinking worst case scenario, glad to hear I was wrong!

 

Yeah, unfortunately I already ripped everything out. And I mean EVERYthing, down to the bare metal inside the car. I plan on restoring it using the cheapest materials possible, yet still have it look good. Taking lots of pictures too.

Fortunately, there's no rust. :hurray: