I was driving my 99 V6 Camry LE the other day and lost power. As I was pulling over to the side of the road, plumes of smoke started coming from under the hood and into the passenger cabin. I got the hood opened up and found that the positive battery terminal had melted, as had the plastic cover and parts of the battery cable sheath. Up until this, I've been battling corrosion on the battery terminals and the clamps on the cables. I believe that this corrosion caused the heat that melted the terminal, which then made the cable loose and caused even more sparks/heat. After fighting for 3 afternoons with the piece of shit I finally managed to get the battery cables and starter removed. However, I have a problem. The positive battery terminal actually has 2 cables that go to it. 1 Cable that went into the starter and was removed by removing a nut, like the instructions online said. However, NOTHING and I mean NOTHING I have read even mentions this other fucking cable. This second cable has a metal ring that's clipped on to the clamp at the end of the cable. If I follow the cable, it is soldered to a thicker cable that appears to go to the fuse box. To remove the positive battery cable I actually cut this off right near the clamp. I brought the starter into O'Reilly and they tested it; confirmed bad. Great, $200 down the drain for a new starter plus the $100 for the battery. Now, I need to find new battery cables. O'Reilly says they have them but their cables are fucking 3.5-4ft long and mine are 1-2ft. Also O'Reilly's cables are single cables. Not these bullshit split cables like I'm stuck with. Then, I also need to find someone with a soldering iron and some solder, and I need to get something to crimp the cables together as well. The moral of the story? I FUCKING HATE CARS.
Get some dielectric grease to keep the corrosion away. Go to Autozone and they have terminals you can bolt the wire to rather than crimp or solder. Home Depot has these connectors that can attach the wire with just flat head screwdriver. Cut up old jumper cable for your wire. Remove all the grounds and clean them with sandpaper because they're probably shitty too.
Awesome, thank you for the advice man. I didn't check GC this morning before going to Autozone, but you're right; that's where it's at. I ended up getting the red spray-on corrosion inhibitor. They ended up having the split cables, but I did have to tweak them a bit. On the new cables I purchased, the secondary cable was only about 6" long, was maybe 8-10ga. thick, and had a metal crimp at the end that was open so it could be crimped down on the end of another cable. In the car I cut off the soldered end of the cable that looks like it runs into the fuse box. Then I stripped back the wire sheathing on that cable, and cut down enough of the copper strands so that the remaining full-length strands had a diameter that would fit inside the little metal crimper. I crimped it down as well as I could with some pliers, and wrapped the whole thing with electrical tape. For the negative cable, there was no cable to crimp in there; so I purchased a 19" 6ga cable that ended in metal grounding lugs on both ends. I cut off one end, and stripped+crimped it just like I did with the positive cable to the fuse box. Then, I thought I was good. I had the new starter installed and new battery cables. "Great, " I said to myself, "now I just have to drop in the new battery and drive away!" The cable clamps on the new battery cables were too small to fit the battery terminals. I used pliers to pry them open as wide as I could, and could barely force them down over the terminals. Then the bolts wouldn't go through the clamps, so I had to use the pliers to close the clamps around the terminals enough to allow the bolt to fit through. It ended up being successful eventually. I also got more weed today so I'm in a much better mood. I still hate my car though
I too used to hate having to work on my cars, but I learned to endure it after being ripped off too many times by "mechanics" Not to mention what a great help the net is in finding correct info, instead of having to rely on some parts counter jockeys for info...I actually kind of enjoy it now.
Actually part of the difficulty was because the online tutorials were incredibly vague and inaccurate. None of them mentioned the second part of each battery cable. A couple of them said the starter was on the passenger side of the car (maybe because in Japan the passenger side is the other side, I dunno). But by combining several incomplete/inaccurate tutorials, I was able to figure out what needed to happen.