Don't go replacing those batteries just yet!

[m-l_johnny]

Great video! Thank you for that. Directly related, I had an issue on the JK a few months back where the gage cluster would start going haywire, even thought there was no noticeable issues while driving. After some interwebz research, I cleaned and inspected the battery terminals. The neg side connector was tight, but as you pointed out, still loose on the terminal. I had some brass shim stock that I inserted. Didn't know that was commercially available. Haven't had a problem since. At least not until a month later when the battery actually did go bad. lol

Sponsored

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Great video! Thank you for that. Directly related, I had an issue on the JK a few months back where the gage cluster would start going haywire, even thought there was no noticeable issues while driving. After some interwebz research, I cleaned and inspected the battery terminals. The neg side connector was tight, but as you pointed out, still loose on the terminal. I had some brass shim stock that I inserted. Didn't know that was commercially available. Haven't had a problem since. At least not until a month later when the battery actually did go bad. lol

The battery terminal "shims" or "caps" have been a thing since us old timers were constantly cleaning battery terminals that were constantly getting black or worse due to the old vented lead/acid batteries. Eventually even a good cable end wouldn't clamp on them we'd cleaned so much lead off those battery terminals. Not as bad in recent decades with batteries better sealed, and AGM with controlled pressure venting - you don't get the gross black or flowery growth on the terminals and have to scrape away material to clean like back then.
Still - the terminals oxidize and need to be cleaned and modern connections don't have the range of forgiveness the older ones had.

 

[DaveL]

I got those from good ole Amazon. I actually saw them on someone else's jeep. They were just what I was looking for. I have aftermarket lockers and the Lasfit switch panel. So, I needed extra connections. Those terminals fit the bill.

Vgate 4 post (12 way) Battery terminal: https://a.co/d/cRayBcp
Vgate 6 post (20 way) Battery Terminal: https://a.co/d/3vU9VRq

Thanks for sharing!
Very helpful.

Great video.

 

[WILDHOBO]

I knew there was something about your "demeanor" in the videos, and just in general. Thank you for your service (and that goes to any other person who has given themselves to this country)

My son and his family live just north of St. Augustine. Been down there a couple of times. (we drove there and back)

I was the only guy in typing class. Not really sure why I wanted to take it - but did. It served me well later. I actually got up to 40 wpm! (compared to my wife, with only 3 fingers on one hand and one that could press a key on the other hand, she got over 80 wpm)
It helped in later life when I wrote some magazine articles, or even later - documented IT systems.


I learned some basics as far as basic cooking, and some basic sewing stuff before I even reached HS. My dad was raised by his aunts as his mother died giving birth to his brother, and his father was never quite the same after he was gassed by the Germans while in France in the army. When my parents went shopping or whatever, Dad's aunts watched us.
I took a multitude of shop classes - machine shop, drafting, electric and electronics class, and furthered the electric through VICA - house wiring and so on.
I got to skip the first 2 levels of auto because I was already doing small engine repair and basic automotive by that time in my own shop (well, Dad's garage and workshop area). To pass out of those classes, i had to go through some Q&A directly with the teacher, and explained the operation of an automatic transmission, the circuits and what each did, and go through and explain the parts and circuits of a Holley 4bbl carburetor.

Diagnosing and troubleshooting. Yeah, that also got me my first job after college.
I saw a notice on the college shop b-board for a mechanic in a nearby town.
I drove over and the "service manager" (informal, he was lead over the others in the shop - a friend of the boss/owner and had worked there a few years) was working on a Ford, hooked up to the Sun scope and was obviously not really happy. Imagine walking in to talk about a job and the guy you need to talk to isn't having a really great day.
We chatted a while, while he worked with the car off and on during our talking. He was trying to diagnose a misfire (gee, where does that term ever come up) and it was sitting there doing fine at the moment.
After a few minutes he asked some questions about my experience with a scope and so on. He asked me to take a look at the scope pattern of that car and tell him what I thought.
Besides diagnosing and troubleshooting as far as terms a good mechanic should know - for me it's also "pattern recognition". Do you see a pattern - what fits, what doesn't fit.
Revving the engine a couple of times under load (in gear, brake held firmly) looking at the scope I saw a pattern that didn't fit. I told him what I thought, suggest what he do.
His next words after making the change - "you start next Monday".

Sad to say, later, when I ended up in IT, at CCC - my "skills" got my boss let go from his job.
Anyone recall Novell Netware? We had 4 (or maybe it was 5?? - memory......) servers. It was still on coax, about the time 10BaseT was becoming the big things. One of the servers, our main one in the IT area, had several network cards tying things together. The boss was big on those multi-network type cards - the equivalent of 2 or more NICs on one card to save slots. As the company grew, more cards were installed to handle more networks.
People gradually started complaining about slow network performance, and waiting forever for a login to take place. It reached the point were on Mondays, many couldn't even get past the login prompt - it would just stop responding. The boss checked over everything he knew, and even called in outside services from a local company that did network setup and diagnosing. They did their network sniffing and found nothing. They spent hours, came back a couple of times, found nothing. It kept getting worse and worse and I had gone in to the boss more than once suggesting maybe having every slot in that server filled with a multiple network NIC was just too much. Naw, that's not it, it's made to handle it! It was the best server you could buy at that time. I observed, seeing patterns, and noticed where most of the complaints came from as far as which networks, timing, etc. I came up with a theory and quietly contacted Novel engineering and ran some ideas past them. They said yeah, that's a credible theory - sounds good. Told my boss - he disagreed and said no, that's not it. His boss was getting the complaints by now and the stuff just kept flowing up hill.
Me being me - I went up the ladder - had put together not only my theories in logical bullet-point form, but included comments from Novel engineers - and a proposed solution.
The CFO asked me to put together a final cost and bring it to him. I did. He looked it over and said if you really believe this is it, order what you need and pull together a crew and set up a schedule.
i had a company run twisted pair to each workstation, took over a closet and installed a series of switches, combined the smaller networks into larger switched networks, took all but a couple of NICs out of the server. This was all done over a long weekend and no one but me, the crew I had (the other IT people in the company) and the boss's boss knew of this. Monday came and the higher ups started getting calls and emails asking what happened - they'd never been able to login so fast or have the network respond so quickly.
My boss was demoted to a really low level - a few weeks later he quit.
The server was spending so much time handling routing between the multitude of small networks on a Monday morning it had no resources to handle login requests. The server was acting more like a router. I was sweating - imagine if I had been wrong?!!

you could never make a good soldier out of me. It doesn't matter how hard I might want to be one.
I could never be a good surgeon - no matter how badly I may want to be.
I can think of a list of things I'd be horrible at - no matter how much I might WANT to, it's just better if I don't. When the zombie apocalypse comes - I doubt I'd be one of the final survivors.

I worked with Novell a ton. I knew it way better than NT in the 90’s. You’re theory was spot on. I’m guessing those “switches” you installed were probably 10mbps hubs though, knowing when that was approximately.

 

[tysongladiator]

I knew there was something about your "demeanor" in the videos, and just in general. Thank you for your service (and that goes to any other person who has given themselves to this country)

My son and his family live just north of St. Augustine. Been down there a couple of times. (we drove there and back)

I was the only guy in typing class. Not really sure why I wanted to take it - but did. It served me well later. I actually got up to 40 wpm! (compared to my wife, with only 3 fingers on one hand and one that could press a key on the other hand, she got over 80 wpm)
It helped in later life when I wrote some magazine articles, or even later - documented IT systems.


I learned some basics as far as basic cooking, and some basic sewing stuff before I even reached HS. My dad was raised by his aunts as his mother died giving birth to his brother, and his father was never quite the same after he was gassed by the Germans while in France in the army. When my parents went shopping or whatever, Dad's aunts watched us.
I took a multitude of shop classes - machine shop, drafting, electric and electronics class, and furthered the electric through VICA - house wiring and so on.
I got to skip the first 2 levels of auto because I was already doing small engine repair and basic automotive by that time in my own shop (well, Dad's garage and workshop area). To pass out of those classes, i had to go through some Q&A directly with the teacher, and explained the operation of an automatic transmission, the circuits and what each did, and go through and explain the parts and circuits of a Holley 4bbl carburetor.

Diagnosing and troubleshooting. Yeah, that also got me my first job after college.
I saw a notice on the college shop b-board for a mechanic in a nearby town.
I drove over and the "service manager" (informal, he was lead over the others in the shop - a friend of the boss/owner and had worked there a few years) was working on a Ford, hooked up to the Sun scope and was obviously not really happy. Imagine walking in to talk about a job and the guy you need to talk to isn't having a really great day.
We chatted a while, while he worked with the car off and on during our talking. He was trying to diagnose a misfire (gee, where does that term ever come up) and it was sitting there doing fine at the moment.
After a few minutes he asked some questions about my experience with a scope and so on. He asked me to take a look at the scope pattern of that car and tell him what I thought.
Besides diagnosing and troubleshooting as far as terms a good mechanic should know - for me it's also "pattern recognition". Do you see a pattern - what fits, what doesn't fit.
Revving the engine a couple of times under load (in gear, brake held firmly) looking at the scope I saw a pattern that didn't fit. I told him what I thought, suggest what he do.
His next words after making the change - "you start next Monday".

Sad to say, later, when I ended up in IT, at CCC - my "skills" got my boss let go from his job.
Anyone recall Novell Netware? We had 4 (or maybe it was 5?? - memory......) servers. It was still on coax, about the time 10BaseT was becoming the big things. One of the servers, our main one in the IT area, had several network cards tying things together. The boss was big on those multi-network type cards - the equivalent of 2 or more NICs on one card to save slots. As the company grew, more cards were installed to handle more networks.
People gradually started complaining about slow network performance, and waiting forever for a login to take place. It reached the point were on Mondays, many couldn't even get past the login prompt - it would just stop responding. The boss checked over everything he knew, and even called in outside services from a local company that did network setup and diagnosing. They did their network sniffing and found nothing. They spent hours, came back a couple of times, found nothing. It kept getting worse and worse and I had gone in to the boss more than once suggesting maybe having every slot in that server filled with a multiple network NIC was just too much. Naw, that's not it, it's made to handle it! It was the best server you could buy at that time. I observed, seeing patterns, and noticed where most of the complaints came from as far as which networks, timing, etc. I came up with a theory and quietly contacted Novel engineering and ran some ideas past them. They said yeah, that's a credible theory - sounds good. Told my boss - he disagreed and said no, that's not it. His boss was getting the complaints by now and the stuff just kept flowing up hill.
Me being me - I went up the ladder - had put together not only my theories in logical bullet-point form, but included comments from Novel engineers - and a proposed solution.
The CFO asked me to put together a final cost and bring it to him. I did. He looked it over and said if you really believe this is it, order what you need and pull together a crew and set up a schedule.
i had a company run twisted pair to each workstation, took over a closet and installed a series of switches, combined the smaller networks into larger switched networks, took all but a couple of NICs out of the server. This was all done over a long weekend and no one but me, the crew I had (the other IT people in the company) and the boss's boss knew of this. Monday came and the higher ups started getting calls and emails asking what happened - they'd never been able to login so fast or have the network respond so quickly.
My boss was demoted to a really low level - a few weeks later he quit.
The server was spending so much time handling routing between the multitude of small networks on a Monday morning it had no resources to handle login requests. The server was acting more like a router. I was sweating - imagine if I had been wrong?!!

you could never make a good soldier out of me. It doesn't matter how hard I might want to be one.
I could never be a good surgeon - no matter how badly I may want to be.
I can think of a list of things I'd be horrible at - no matter how much I might WANT to, it's just better if I don't. When the zombie apocalypse comes - I doubt I'd be one of the final survivors.

Thank you my friend! I really appreciate that!

I'm about an hour and a half from St Augustine. If you ever make another trip, let me know. I'd definitely make the drive to meet and say hello. Always down for meeting good people. It's kind of like therapy for me.

But, I'm not going to lie. I was a nerd in high school. I took typing class because there were girls in there. Lol. But like yourself, later on in life, I am benefitting from that! In the latter part of my career (when I got into recruiting), I watched a kid struggle just to type 31wpm. It was his only way into the military for the only job he qualified for. To watch him struggle was painful and annoying at the same time.

It does seem like it has benefitted you way more than it has me. Magazine articles and IT documentation? Those are big accomplishments.?

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I worked with Novell a ton. I knew it way better than NT in the 90’s. You’re theory was spot on. I’m guessing those “switches” you installed were probably 10mbps hubs though, knowing when that was approximately.

My smell check wants to make Novell into novel. Need to remind it.
1998 or around that time - PFG contacted me and offered me another 10K if I came and worked for them.
Yeah, that's right - the switches came later. Hubs in the early-mid 90s were cheaper, lower latency than switches - as long as there wasn't a collision problem. It was also easy to connect twisted pair Ethernet to 10Base2 with a hub if it had the right connections.

The Russian teams moved to a building across the street because of the large staff growth during the big Series IV Gazprom project - we had fiber run across under the street and got the two networks connected in. They demanded top equipment and justified it by the big bucks being brought in on that project.

My first experience with Novell was 2.2 in about 1990 perhaps. 10BaseT wasn't yet a decided standard. It was "Ethernet over twisted pair" with hubs made by a company in MN. Back then you could easily use the same wiring the telephone systems used, including, gasp! Flat 4 pair cable. Volume size was limited so as the company grew it wasn't totally straight-forward adding space.

 

[WILDHOBO]

My smell check wants to make Novell into novel. Need to remind it.
1998 or around that time - PFG contacted me and offered me another 10K if I came and worked for them.
Yeah, that's right - the switches came later. Hubs in the early-mid 90s were cheaper, lower latency than switches - as long as there wasn't a collision problem. It was also easy to connect twisted pair Ethernet to 10Base2 with a hub if it had the right connections.

The Russian teams moved to a building across the street because of the large staff growth during the big Series IV Gazprom project - we had fiber run across under the street and got the two networks connected in. They demanded top equipment and justified it by the big bucks being brought in on that project.

My first experience with Novell was 2.2 in about 1990 perhaps. 10BaseT wasn't yet a decided standard. It was "Ethernet over twisted pair" with hubs made by a company in MN. Back then you could easily use the same wiring the telephone systems used, including, gasp! Flat 4 pair cable. Volume size was limited so as the company grew it wasn't totally straight-forward adding space.

Yep. Lots of cat3. And lots of collisions.

 

[tysongladiator]

Great video! Thank you for that. Directly related, I had an issue on the JK a few months back where the gage cluster would start going haywire, even thought there was no noticeable issues while driving. After some interwebz research, I cleaned and inspected the battery terminals. The neg side connector was tight, but as you pointed out, still loose on the terminal. I had some brass shim stock that I inserted. Didn't know that was commercially available. Haven't had a problem since. At least not until a month later when the battery actually did go bad. lol

You're welcome! Here's something crazy for you. Back then when I found that issue, I went to the dealer. They took the IBS and connector from a brand new jeep and it had the same issue. The said the battery terminal was smaller because I had used a battery brush to clean the post and ground down the terminal. I said, "Yea, that's weird because I've never removed the connector." They told me there was nothing they could do and advised me to just put a screw in it. WTF. That's when I went to searching and found the shims.

 

[tysongladiator]

Yep. Lots of cat3. And lots of collisions.

You all are just as big of nerds that I am!???

 

[WILDHOBO]

You all are just as big of nerds that I am!???

Probably worse.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

They told me there was nothing they could do and advised me to just put a screw in it.

LOL man, that's OLD school! I've seen so many connections "fixed" by running a sheet metal or wood screw down between the clamp and battery post. Get's a bit bad, give the screw another turn or two.
Sad part is I even see that sort of thing at car shows - and those terminals that clamp onto the cable that look like heck with the copper cable turning green and all.
They have $400 in a carburetor but won't spend 20 bucks for a cable? (maybe that's how they afforded the carburetor?)

Dan will likely remember Token Ring networks - that's what PFG had before they finally moved to 10BaseT and beyond. I can recall one part of a building where they were running out of space in the floor channels for cable so some of the network people started using extra pairs in the phone cables for their print sharing devices (rather than network printers, they use print sharing devices, usually by connecting to one of the com ports and redirecting print commands to COM1 for example using the autoexec bat file, to the print share device, to the printer) Man, that caused some cross-talk issues. I laughed about the calls we got "it's really odd, when my phone rings that printer over there starts printing dozens of pages of garbage".
I was glad to see token ring go away.

 

[djthumper]

Another great video Tyson!

Enjoy your Veteran's Day weekend!

 

[WILDHOBO]

LOL man, that's OLD school! I've seen so many connections "fixed" by running a sheet metal or wood screw down between the clamp and battery post. Get's a bit bad, give the screw another turn or two.
Sad part is I even see that sort of thing at car shows - and those terminals that clamp onto the cable that look like heck with the copper cable turning green and all.
They have $400 in a carburetor but won't spend 20 bucks for a cable? (maybe that's how they afforded the carburetor?)

Dan will likely remember Token Ring networks - that's what PFG had before they finally moved to 10BaseT and beyond. I can recall one part of a building where they were running out of space in the floor channels for cable so some of the network people started using extra pairs in the phone cables for their print sharing devices (rather than network printers, they use print sharing devices, usually by connecting to one of the com ports and redirecting print commands to COM1 for example using the autoexec bat file, to the print share device, to the printer) Man, that caused some cross-talk issues. I laughed about the calls we got "it's really odd, when my phone rings that printer over there starts printing dozens of pages of garbage".
I was glad to see token ring go away.

I definitely do. And I did plenty of print sharing with autoexec.bat over the years, even well after token ring was gone. But have you extended 9 and/or 25 pin serial connections over 9600 baud modems with serial multiplexors, in order to connect remote wyse terminals to SCO Xenix or Unix? Those were the days. We had to walk customers through pinning out their own custom serial connections over the phone.

 

[SamO.5]

THANKS!
Troubleshooting 101, thanks, Teach!
I like those battery connectors. Sure didnt know about the Fuse Array, either.

 

[tysongladiator]

THANKS!
Troubleshooting 101, thanks, Teach!
I like those battery connectors. Sure didnt know about the Fuse Array, either.

Troubleshooting is something that should be done whether it' electrical or mechanical. People seem to not want to do that anymore.

I actually saw those on another jeep and knew I had to have them. And that fuse array is not a very noticeable part. Easily overlooked as an issue. Especially if you didn't know it existed.

I'm just trying to possibly save somebody a little headache and hopefully a little money.

Thanks for the compliment.

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