Grounding - an input from Ronald McCoy of Indiana

Ron is a friend and second (?) cousin who is very experienced with vehicle repair and electrical issues. He sent me this personal input about the importance of grounding in vehicles. I found it very interesting...


"With the advent of electronics in the automotive world it has become more and more important to be sure the grounding in your vehicle is proper. In the sheriff dept cars I work on, we used to have an "electronics specialist" for an installer of the emergency equipment. His big problem was he got lost when he went from milliamps to multiple amps. 


He would ground the center console with just the seat bolts (through the carpet). With the possibility of 100 amps+ current (50 amps in reality), this was not enough. The car would actually turn things on by itself. One time when driving the car, the siren started sounding off uncontrollably. The main reason we found the problem was that the car had 4 trannys put in, in 40k miles. 


Before we refused the 5th saying the driver was abusing the car, we looked into the problems and found that some of the emergency equipment was actually turning on and off by itself while sitting in the shop with nobody around. After the complete rewire, the car has had no trans issues for another 70 k miles. This is just one of the cars out of 100 that I have had to rewire because of various electrical issues, but I though this would be a good example of needing the grounding to be proper on all vehicles, especially with the addition of electronics throughout the industry."



Thanks, Ron. It's amazing what can happen when the simplest of issues isn't done right. And since grounds are involved in all of the circuits, it has the potential to effect everything and anything.


Steve Watson, Watson's StreetWorks, http://www.watsons-streetworks.com