Posted by D Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:46:33 :
In Reply to: Re: couple of questions posted by mike fagan [69.122.243.150] on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 22:32:18 :
Before you scrape and clean every connection over and over, hang a voltmeter at the battery side of the coil and see what the voltage actually is while cranking. If it's good, bad connections aren't your problem. Also, use the meter to check each connection: put the meter across the connection, for example, one lead pushed solidly into the battery post and another into the cable near it, and crank. If there is a bad connection, you'll usually find there's just one bad connection and instead of scraping and futzing with every one of them over and over, you can just fix the one bad one.
An even easier low-tech test for bad connections on the starter circuit is to crank for a goodly time and then quickly feel all the connections and cables. One that's bad enough to cause a significant voltage drop will get noticeably hot. I've even had them to where I could spot the bad one by smoke coming out of it after a good bit of cranking.