Witch side off the battery should the cut off go on, pos or neg?
C2 battery cut off
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Re: C2 battery cut off
Check out a boat shop for a variety of styles of cutoff switches. I have mine mounted on the upper firewall but below the heater box on the passenger side and accessible from the drivers seat. I split the positive cable which is then attached to the switch.
Required drilling 3 small holes but the instant access is worth it to me.- Top
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Re: C2 battery cut off
Negative. And Wirthco guillotine.
Attached Files- Top
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Re: C2 battery cut off
I had always removed negative for all my cars for any electrical work.
66 Corvette shop manual, chapter Body Electrical page 14-4, indicates disconnect positive.
The cables on mine when I got it had cut off on positive. I replaced cables to original type spring-ring. Clamps on tight, easy enough to disconnect and looks exactly right.- Top
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Re: C2 battery cut off
Moroso and several marine battery switches instruct the cutoff to be in the positive cable. Many others give no specific directions as to which cable to split. Those green terminal switches are sized for the neg post.
Instructions call for neg cable to be disconnected first when removing the battery. Positive cable to be connected first when installing a battery.
What happens if you drop a file for instance, and it bridges from a positive terminal on the alternator to ground when the negative cable is disconnected?- Top
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Re: C2 battery cut off
"What happens if you drop a file for instance, and it bridges from a positive terminal on the alternator to ground when the negative cable is disconnected?"
Electrical designers primarily used the convention of running B+ to all the various components and letting their switching functions complete the circuit path to ground versus switching power to the components with their ground connections permanently wired. Bottom line, open circuit is open circuit.
What I'm saying is without a full complete path from the battery positive terminal, out through the branch circuits and back to the battery negative terminal, you CAN'T have a completed circuit. Therefore, it doesn't really matter which side of the battery you open circuit when you take it out of the system.
Some doubt this because they can see a small momentary arc when connecting one side of the battery first vs. the other side but they don't really understand the effect they're seeing. With the design convention of making the 'hot' side of connections permanent and switching the 'cold' side of items, you have a system capacitance effect.
When the POS cable is attached, ALL of the items connected make a state change from 0 VDC to B+ VDC and there will be some minor transient current flow to 'fill the pipeline'. But, without a completed path to ground (the battery's NEG terminal), this is only a short-lived phenomenon.
Consequently, if the battery's NEG post is actually disconnected and you accidently bridge a 'hot' connection to frame ground (like the alternator example here), you'll see the same transient effect as frame changes its electrical potential (0 VDC -> +B VDC) which happens rather quickly. The frame represents a LOT of metal meaning it's a BIG capacitor, but the steady state current flow from this action is still 0 Amp.- Top
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