Yesterday I drove the J up to Mopars on the Mississippi in Dubuque, IA, and it ran and drove great – until – about 2 minutes from my destination, when suddenly and without warning, a terrible noise began emanating from the engine compartment. Sounded like a really bad water pump, but temp. gauge good. Noticed the ammeter pegged on charge – electrical malfunction – with no place to pull over I briskly made a mad dash to the show, pulled in and pulled over, shut the ignition off, removed the key – starter motor kept running!
Fortunately, I had a ½” wrench in the console (ALWAYS carry one), popped the hood, removed the negative cable, assessed damage. Nothing visible, but bad burned rubber smell. Quickly determined it must be a stuck solenoid or bad starter relay (that turned out to be wrong). Our buddy Noel came over with a spare starter relay, which I installed, no change. Fortunately, local buddy and long-time member Dave Schwandt was able to come out with his 3500 Dually and his son’s trailer, and we loaded up the J and took it back to Cedar Rapids.
Diagnosis today – took all of 3 minutes – positive battery cable from the starter relay to the starter motor, insulation burned right through, battery cable and solenoid wire then shorted, starter engaged continuously. This was a reproduction cable from the Inc. 300 Club, with no heat shielding. When I installed the cable I purposely made sure it was a couple inches away from the header. It ran near the heat pipe, but that wasn’t the issue. Evidently, on a long run, the header gets so hot that it was enough to melt all the insulation. I had heat wrap on the shift cable, as that had been damaged long ago due to running over the header, but didn’t wrap the repop battery cable.
Lesson: cable MUST be heat wrapped, or do NOT use the Inc. club repop cable Note: Quirey now reproduces the proper cable I believe; Jamie can confirm. The photo below shows the damage – see lower center of photo. This cable is NOT sitting against the header, but it still burned.
Carl B.
Older and now wiser
Back to the Home of the Forward Look Network
Archive Sitemap