HELP! (Electrical Problem)

[Guest spyhunter2k]

So I'm enjoying my 5th day of driving my newly painted 90 Reatta. I go to crank it this afternoon to drive home from work and ...NOTHING. Nada. No turn over, no lights, no juice to anything. The car is deader than a doornail. A friend offered a jump and it starts 10 seconds after hooking up the cables.

Fine, I think, my battery has decided to go kaput. I'll drive home and install a new one tonight. Then it gets wierd. After driving for 5-10 minutes, the car dies in mid-traffic. I coast to the side of the road and start to call for a ride, but to my surprise, the car starts right back up, and I make it the rest of the way home (about 30 mins withuot a problem). I can't tell what my volts are because I just took my dash out a couple of days ago to send for it to be repaired.

A friend says it sounds like a loose connection somewhere, but I can't find anything. The negative bolt into the battery is somewhat stripped, but gets pretty tight before getting loose again, tight enough I think to be providing a good ground.

Can anyone help? If there's any type of problem I hate, it's intermittant ones. Also, the car has had an intermitant miss since I bought it a couple of months ago. I've been focused on getting the car painted and I planned on tackling the cause of the miss once the new dash module was received.

Thanks very much in advance,

Seth

[Reatta45]

If you allow ?stripped? electrical connections, especially at the battery, you need to get use to intermittent problems, there will be many in your future. KennyV.

[Guest spyhunter2k]

Point taken. I'll go ahead and take care of that. If it's that simple, I'll count myself lucky.

[Shelby]

The stripped terminal is pretty common in GM cars and trucks.

To get the reliabity back you should replace the battery.

The problem is from the terminal bolt being over tightened. So be cafeful.

Replace the terminal bolts with the proper length. To long and it goes through the side of the battery into the cell and the acid leaks and corrodes the inside of the plastic cable end. The Short and you have the same problem you have now.

When doing this you can peel the plastic back on the cable ends and clean both sides of the copper terminal end.

[Guest tomt]

Newly painted: Two things.

I had an old VW once that was re-painted by Earl Scheib. It was heated in an oven afterwards to harden the paint. Some of the older wires fried.

Also, it lights were removed for painting, it could be bad grounding to painted over areas.

[Guest spyhunter2k]

Yeah I'm thinking I should probably go ahead and replace the battery as well. I'm still not sure that it's not the culprit. I have a trip in a couple of weeks that I want to take the car on and I don't want to be worried the whole time that the car's going to shut down or leave me stranded.

I don't think any issues were created from painting. I painted it; nothing was baked (as soon as I finish the bumper mods, I'll post pics). I could be wrong. Since I changed the color, I did do some underhood spraying.