You may recall in the last episode where the Taurus left the girls stranded with an engine that refused to crank? This weeks story revisits the Battery Box. Seems as though the car won’t start. (this time in the garage however) I couldn’t believe it. Is this a trick? I fixed it right? I turned the key and ClickClickClickClickClick, just like before. What the… nervous nagging self doubts and paranoid insecure feelings began to invade. This can not be!

I fixed it already, didn’t I? Is the problem something else? If it is I won’t be able to solve it. I give up! The dealer is going to remember me from the last time I was there (with the aborted electric door locks repair that I refused to pay for) and really sock it to me this time. I jumped started it with my new yellow and black Western Auto 12 ft. 16 gauge cables. I probed with my Ace Hardware voltage multi-tester. Battery voltage bad. Alternator output good. What could it be? Was the exchanged old battery still good after all? Maybe the new DieHard was bad too?

Tune in next week… No I wouldn’t do that to you. Mystery solved! (I hope?!) Somebody left a map light on in the overhead. I thought I would say !’?#!*%.’ but I didn’t because I was so relieved. The vehicle had sat overnight with a lone map light burning brightly and innocently. Undetected because it is so small and is designed to illuminate by spot and not by flood it was enough to kill even a DieHard.

I drove it to the airport to make sure it was OK for Dede. When I came back two days later it was fine. Started right up. Whew! I get home safely ready to tell Dede beaming and proud that her car is good, when SMS greets me with, “Hey Dad! The Pontiac’s dead.” No! Now I know this is some sort of cruel joke. Right? Tell me this isn’t happening.

No lie. It’s completely dead. No lights at all. Oh man! Well, the problem here was that the battery cable was slightly loose. Cars from the 70’s used those ridiculous side terminal design posts which I stripped out one time by overtightening. So I was a little gun shy with this one and had torqued the cable to the battery terminal delicate like it was eggs. This allowed some room for corrosion to do its work. So when I hooked up the Jumper cables to get the other car going again the battery cable must have shifted ever so slightly so as to mate corrosion with corrosion. Electrical contact was lost and that’s what happened. I cleaned the connections and re-fastened. Voila! Mystery ends.