Electrical question - am I missing something here?

[Everett Ogilvie]

After driving the '66 today, I pulled it in the garage, and as I always do - I removed the negative battery cable. A little later I opened the driver door and realized that the interior lights were on... tried the radio, it works, instrument lights work, taillights work - who knows, maybe it would have started if I would have tried that! Am I missing something here? How can juice flow from the battery if the battery itself is not grounded (via the cable that is unhooked)? The clock circuit doesn't have something to do with this, does it (as in, when it winds down, will the juice stop flowing)?

[Roy Braatz]

Re: Electrical question - am I missing something h

Junk the battery keep the Corvette and contact the X-files.

[Jack H.]

Re: Electrical question - am I missing something h

If the battery is open circuited (either the pos or neg cable COMPLETELY removed), you can't have energy flow. The only way to explain what you observed is there's either another battery somewhere or there's another valid ground path to the battery (like electrolyte forming a 'skin effect' from the NEG top post, to the chassis via the battery tray.

[Everett Ogilvie]

Mystery Solved !

All day I have been thinking about equilibration of charge, potential, etc., and I was about to contact Scully and Mulder. Of course you are right Jack - there can't be any flow of charge unless there is a path. When you said the path could be there even when I thought I had removed the path, it jogged a few brain cells. I had the battery out recently, and when I re-installed it I played with "centering" the shield/retainer to make sure there was plenty of clearance between the top shield and the positive battery post. I obviously moved it too far and the shield was indeed BARELY touching the extended base of the negative post! I moved it back about 0.5 mm and no lights, radio, or tailights!

Now that I look at the top retainer, it strikes me as quite odd - it has a cutout (radius) near the postive post for clearance, and it has another radiused cutout on the other side but it is NOT lined up with the negative post - it is in the wrong location. The battery looks like a standard Group 24 post arrangement (same arrangement as my '66 repro Delco), but the negative post sure isn't where the top retainer cutout is... which can put the retainer very close to the negative post. Any thoughts about why the radii are where they are on the retainer?