Ground Straps

[Aaron]

So I'm sure we all saw the big thread started by $Rich$ who added a ground strap from his motor to the cradle and he said it really helped how the car behaved. From there it exploded in popularity do to what all it helps on the car, and how cheap it is.

I've decided to take the leap since my car is displaying a lot of the problems that these guys are getting fixed (Unstable idle, idle up and down with blinker on, etc). I bought a $3.74 4 gauge 24" long battery cable from Advanced Auto (Wish it was shorter).

Here is the thread about it:
http://www.fiero.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/043240.html

On a side note, I am going to go return mine and get a shorter one, as I want to put it in the same place he did. I'll let ya know if it helps at all, though I'd much rather be pulling the 2.8l out than helping it.

[Aaron]

I decided not to return the piece, I am instead cutting it in half or so and putting another end onto it. I don't feel too good, so I'm gonna finish tonight or tomorrow. 11 second Fiero here I come. Well, it is a V6, so it will run 11s at 160, but then the turbo I don't have will spool and it will ownorz teh V8.

[Aaron]

So I put on two cables, ended up buying a 40" cable, which made both fit perfectly. I'll snap a few pics tomorrow. The 40" cost LESS than the 24" cuz they misslabeled it, and I argued with the manager under false advertising and he let me have it for the same price as the 24" cable, which was sweet.

I used both cables are ran one from the EGR bolt to where the factory neg to frame ground is, right on the fender area below the battery. The other once I ran from the EGR bolt to the negative terminal.

Impressions. It seemed to do a lot more on the other cars than it did mine, I hardly noticed it. But it is good to have, and good general maintanence. I didn't even check my windows. The car did start right up, which it rarely does, and it did it thrice in a row, and that is as many purple hearts as Kerry has! We'll see if it starts right up for the rest of the week or not. The car seemed to pick up some high end power, but it was a cool night and the motor wasn't fully warm, I doubt it picked up any power as a result of the cables. I'll see whether I'm glad I did it or not in the coming week, but for my car at least, it was more work than it was worth.

Glad to know it was working properly though!

[Aaron]

Not like anyone has seemed to care, but here are some pics of my "install."

It is really hard to see where they go, so I'll do my best to explain.

This is the battery. In the lower left you can see the copper ending on one of the grounds, this is the one that goes from the EGR bolt to the factory frame ground. I used sandpaper and degreaser to strip the paint here and clean it as well.


This is where the EGR bolt is. Follow the cable on the right down, and you can see a silver terminal. The silver terminal is the line to the frame, but this is the same bolt that the negative battery ground goes as well.

[z.MacK]

stick an ohm meter between the engine, and some other ground point to see if it helped

I put on a small extra ground on mine about a year ago. I found a few rusted ground points and seemed like a good idea.