battery terminals sparking

mike012v · May 30, 2014

Wired my car up today after my rebuild, and tried to hook the battery up, but the terminals kept sparking. Any clues to why its doing that?

kb1982 · May 30, 2014

You either have a wire that is grounding or something is turned on in the car and drawing power as soon as you hook up the battery.

mike012v · May 30, 2014

Something is probably grounding, cause nothing is on in the car

ttocs · May 31, 2014

what kind of spark are we talkin bout?

mike012v · May 31, 2014

Its just steady sparking on the negative terminal. Sparks out real crazy, but enough to make you pull the terminal off

nightfire · May 31, 2014

Please change your sig....cam(S), not cam :deeplist:

mike012v · May 31, 2014

You get the point...

ttocs · May 31, 2014

well as he said there is something either wrong and drawing too much current or something is still on that is drawing current. We need too narrow down what it is and the only way I can think about doing that is with an amp meter/multi-meter. Normally to find current draws that are killing batteries you disconnect the battery, connect the meter in between the battery/car and then start to pull fuses till you see the current draw on the car drop when you pull the correct fuse. We might need to do it backwards with you meaning that you would take a pic of your fusebox(so you know what fuse goes where) and then pulling every fuse out prior too hooking up the meter. Your meter should start off at 0 or very low and then start putting fuses back in one at a time till you see the current draw on the meter jump up to designate which circuit has an issue and from there we can narrow it down further.

Just out of stupidity make sure your not connecting the cables backwards, it can happen to the best of us. I had to laugh a little one day as I walked out of intel with my areas two lead techs. One had a friend waiting for him and her battery died while she waited so I watched the two lead techs hook up the battery backwards to jump start it. It sparked like hell when they started to do it and I commented that something wasn't right there and to take a better look. My lead tech said no that's normal and just slapped the lead on the battery and there was one semi-big spark till it was on there, and then the insulation started to smoke/melt when I again said something was wrong and to disconnect it. My tech replied that its just pulling a lot of current because the battery was dead. I finally noticed it was backwards so I finally stopped talking and grabbed the neg terminal long enough to disconnect it as I am sure it was about to start to turn orange.