The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Burnt up leads

Finished rewiring my 69 chevy with ez wire kit and got it running with everything working well, i thought. Yesterday I ran it for about 25 mins. trying to get the temp gauge to work. Then took it down the road about 3 miles to the store and when I came back it was smoking from under the hood. Looked like it burnt all the insulation off the leads from the battery to the motor mount, where the leads crossed. Any ideas of what may have caused this? The leads crossed each other at the motor mount and I'd like to think that this wa the problem but I think it had to be something else. Could the alternator have caused this? The battery was pretty hot but nothing at the fuse box was hot. All the fuses may have blown, for all I know, I didn't get to look at it closely because it was dark and I need to get to sleep.

get better quality (thicker insulation) and (??) larger gauge wire, if necessary. w/ good terminal ends.
make sure the nuts are tight so as to stop any possible arcing, provides good solid grounding.

Birdieall,

If your rig is a '69, it must be fused quite well. If a circuit is fused, and it pulls more amps than the rating of the fuse, the fuse will blow, saving the wire and device.

If your problem only involved the battery and cables, it was a localized short and wouldn't affect the rest of the wiring in the rig.

If you were driving it at night, and the system didn't blink off, again, it is probably just a battery cable issue.

Burning the insulation off of heavy gauge battery cables would take a pretty good current draw. If the starter were stuck "on" as you were driving, this could have caused the problem.

You probably would have heard the starter screaming at you, but you might check to see if it looks 'cooked'.

Let us know what happens.

Stuart

What side of the motor mount are you connected to? The engine side or the frame side and do you have a ground from the engine to the frame? Is there a gound from the chassis to the frame?
Grounds can do some funnie things. I know on a Plymouth Horizon if the engine gound is not connected, it will wear out a rt. front wheel bearing because it trys to ground through the bearing. It will get hot enough to burn the grease in the bearing.

sounds like a short to me... are the cables getting squished between the engine mount and frame?

Cables will overheat if they are not well tightened down or if the wires are not well connected to their terminal ends, both at the battery and the other end. High resistance at the connections is the cause of this overheating. Wires with good insulation crossing one another should not be a problem. Bad grounds to the cab and frame can show up as hot choke cables or throttle linkages. What did the ammeter indicate during this time?

Got it figured out! Kinda of embarassing, but the most obvious answer is the correct answer. The postive lead was too close to the exhaust header and it melted to the pipes. Replaced the cables and drove it home!