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Am thinking of purchasing a Optima Battery 6V for my 49 Thriftmaster.

Questions: Will it fit? Can you still jump start this type of battery if you need to?

Anyone have an opinion, experiences with the Optima product. Looking for feedback.

Many thanks.

....ran Optima's for past 5 years. One small problem and it was taken care of. Its about as good for the money as any on the market.....but I do have a Diehard in my 37.

I have an Optima 6V in my 51 3100. It will fit in the box ok. I like it very much. I left it hooked up all winter in an unheated garage and it turned the engine over just fine yesterday when I fired it up for the first time.

Chris

I'm starting my fifth year with my 6v Optima. No issues. It was a bit of a challenge to mount in my under floor battery box because of the narrowness of the battery. My battery "box" is a metal strip about 3" wide that allowed the Optima to fall out one side or the other. I fixed the problem by attaching two pieces of 2x6 to the sides of the battery.

ditto to all of the above (I've had one 6v Optima for 5 years and two others for 3 years).

Some people report problems with recent Optima batteries. Most likely it is due to allowing the battery to discharge too far. In that case, a special charging procedure is recommended.

Tell me more about the special charging procedure that is required to recharge the battery. A slow charge over the winter is not recommended, or perhaps not even needed? How about jump starting?

You have to charge them woth a trickle charge, no more than 2 amps. There's some so-called "experts" out there that say you have to fast charge them or use an incredibly high amp rate, but that is a sure fire way to ruin one. Jump starting isn't an issue.

Thank you to everyone for your help. Appreciate it.

Charging an Optima Battery (float charger and standard charging).

For a deeply discharged battery (from a product review):

"I had two other negative Red Top experiences, one from vehicles in storage for 6-12 months, unable to take a trickle charge afterwards. Optima says this is a common problem, but it’s the battery charger’s fault. In their words:

If an OPTIMA is deeply discharged (below 10.5 volts) most basic chargers will not supply a charge. Also keep in mind an OPTIMA will not recharge properly if treated as a regular flooded or gel battery. To charge the battery, you can wire a second fully charged automotive battery (12+V) to the discharged AGM in parallel (+ to + and – to –). Then hook up the charger to either battery, setting the charger at 10 amps. Leave for two hours, monitoring frequently. During this process if the discharged battery gets very hot or if it is venting (hissing sound from vents) then stop this process immediately. When the discharged battery reaches 10.5 volts or more, remove the standard battery and continue charging the AGM until fully charged.

For normal charging a relatively low current, such as one or two amps can work well, but when the battery has been deeply discharged, some sulfation of the battery plates may have occurred. If you charge at 10 amps, the higher current will help to break up this sulfation. If you have an automatic charger, let it run until the charger indicates charging is complete. If you have a manual charger, you can get a rough estimate of the charging time in hours of a completely discharged battery (11.2V) by multiplying the capacity (amp hours or Ah) of the battery by 1.2. If your battery is not completely discharged the time would be less.

In most cases these steps will recover the AGM battery. It’s okay for the AGM battery to get slightly warm during the charging process. If it’s hot to the touch it means there’s a short and the process should be discontinued."

I had a completely discharged 6v battery that would not charge with my non-automatic cheap 6v charger. A similar technique to the one above brought life back to the battery (still working 2 years later).

My son used to use Optima batteries and if they got discharged to where they wouldn't take charge, he would wire another fully charged battery out of one of our trucks in parallel and put it on the charger. I thought it was a trick those guys had learned. I had no idea that it was recommended by the factory.

I was told that Optima was sold and moved to Mexico and they are not as good as they used to be.

some production might be from Mexico, but the company is still in Milwaukee WI .... and I've heard they're better than they used to be

some info from Optima about deep discharge - whole bunch of other clips from them on the right

Bill

Optima was bought out by Johnson Controls about 6-7 years ago. Production did move to Mexico, I beleive it's still down there.
An addition to my earlier post concerning high charging amperage, I would not consider 10 amps as "high". The rates that I had heard from the so-called "experts" was more along the lines of 100-200 amps, which would very quickly explode any battery.

Another good thing is they don't vent acid all over your nice truck.

All optimas are now made in mexico, thats why im out of a job, they shut the plant down in jan 2009. still owned by JCI, it was their decision to open a plant in mexico to save money.

Case closed! No optima for me. BUY AMERICAN. :mad:

Good luck with that, as pretty much all automotive batteries are manufactured in Mexico these days. There's only maybe 1 or 2 high end battery lines that are manufactured in the US.