I am officially retarded

[spoonraker 10+ year member]

Well I've had my CarPC running for quite a while now, close to if not more than a year. In that time I've slowly upgraded some of my sound system, starting with an audiobahn sub and the cheapest sony amp Wal-Mart had to offer. Anyway so a couple months ago I decided to finalize my system and redo all the wiring and get everything nice and clean and permanent. Immediately afterwards I noticed that my car was having trouble starting...sometimes. It would often click but never turn over. Sometimes it would do this for quite a few cranks, sometimes just for a split second, and sometimes all the electronics in the car would reset like my PC and the trip odometer and stuff like that. So I was convinced I had a bad starter solenoid because I couldn't think of anything else that would explain that. After about a month of driving around like that (the problem was so intermittent I didn't care to spend money and fix it) I noticed that the screen for the PC was developing some interference. It got progressively worse of the next week and eventually got so bad the screen would completely cut out, the touchscreen would stop responding, and even the PC its self would occasionally spontaneously reboot. I did loads of testing. I took my laptop out to the car, I took the carPC inside, I took a regular ATX PSU outside, I took the touchscreen from the car inside, just about everything I could think of to isolate the problem. Finally I came to the conclusion that it was my power lines, that I hadn't touched since the update a month prior, causing the noise. I was so fed up with all the electrical problems with my car that I said screw it, I'm just gonna overhaul the electrical and get it over with. I set up an appointment to take my car to a shop and get the starter looked at/replaced and I had plans today to buy about $120 worth of new wires off of knukonceptz.

Well guess what. Last night while taking one last look over my wiring, confirming once again that there was no apparent reason for the noise, I accidentally tugged on one of the ground wires and the freaking bolt that held every single ground wire for the whole system to the chassis popped right out. Somehow it had stripped through the frame and vibrated loose over time. Guess what, I tighten that sucker up and instantly all my noise and interference is completely gone :S I'm going to relocated it slightly and attach it much more firmly.

This still leaves the starter problem unsolved... so this morning as planned I dropped my car off at a local shop, and no more than 20 minutes later I get a call back from them saying it's all done. I asked them what the problem was and he tells me that the negative battery cable was loose and that was all that was causing the problem. When I finished working on the wiring before I just hand tightened the cable down a bit to test and see if everything came on properly. Apparently I never got around to tightening it all the way down.

Cliff notes : Major electrical problems have been making me hate my life for the last month. Turns out they were all caused by a couple loose screws.

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[jer_stud56 10+ year member]

I also had the problem with the car starting funny. Turns out it is also my negative battery terminal. Whenever it happens, I just move it back and forth and it works fine again. I'm too lazy to tighten it.

Glad to see you saved some money there though //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[spoonraker 10+ year member]

Yeah I was completely prepared to just spend like $500 and get the **** thing fixed once and for all. Ended up spending $14 on some new ring terminals, screws, and locking washers and a couple feet of new ground wire.

 

[ZeroSktr56 10+ year member]

ouch. hate when things like that happen. same thing happened with my amp. would cut out, not turn etc, went on for one month and then i checked the ground and ding! loose ground. It's always the little things that get ya.

 

[spoonraker 10+ year member]

It's held on by two self tapping screws with locking washers now, should hold pretty good, if not...well I'll worry about it then.

 

[azbass 5,000+ posts]

It's held on by two self tapping screws with locking washers now, should hold pretty good, if not...well I'll worry about it then.

probably should bolt it..

 

[Lakota 5,000+ posts]

When I first started reading your problems the first thing that I though was "it's probably a bad ground."