Battery Disconnect

A good addition or improvement to your classic car that a lot of guys sometimes overlook, but can really save you, is a battery disconnect. And what a battery disconnect does is like the name implies, disconnects the battery. And the reason you wanna do this is, if you're in storage, you don't want to worry about the battery drawing down, or even as weekend warriors that maybe only take their car out on Saturday afternoon, they don't want the battery to drain down over the course of the week. You get out there Saturday morning to take it for a ride and the battery's dead. So it can prevent drawdown. Also, because it's an electrical system, you know, things can go wrong. Things can short out even when the car is just sitting there. So by being able to disconnect the battery, you have eliminated a possible fire damage, as well. Not to mention, you know, by having the battery disconnected, It's a theft deterrent too, because, you know, let's face it, A lot of our classical cars don't have the most sophisticated electronics in them. So, just like the old days, they can hot wire them cars to actually run. Battery disconnect provides just that one more thing that they have to deal with in order to get the car running. So having a battery disconnect in your car can be a really good investment. A few basic styles here. You know, when I say there's like... These are just a few there, I have seen dozens of different kinds of battery disconnects. One of the most common style that you'll see in classic cars is what they call a, "Knob style." Basically, they've split this terminal into two pieces. And by tightening the Knob, completes the connection between these two pieces, and then your battery is functional. Just by turning the Knob, you can then cut that circuit. And the reason why that's nice is, if you're at a car show, there's nothing more upsetting than if you're at a car show you've had a great time, the day is over, you hop in your car, and suddenly your car won't start. So it becomes a way to disconnect power to your car when you're not driving it. And, you know, you'll have the hood open anyways to show off that beautiful engine. Just the turn of a Knob, you've completed the circuit, and you can go. Well you might ask, "Well what about, you know, I've set the clock in my dash or my radio presets will all go away if I somehow lose power to those." The way around that, and this is a simple addition to your Knob style disconnect, and that is the introduction of just a thin and fused accessory wire. And what this does is it permits a little bit of the electricity flow and it's fused with a 15 amp fuse. It permits enough juice to go through there to operate your clocks or your radio memory. But if you tried to start it without the Knob being down, all that juice would try to go through this 15 amp fuse and that fuse would pop right away. So, you know, it couldn't be stolen or anything, or if you did have a dead short or something, Your car is not gonna burn up because you're not gonna get enough juice through this thin wire to actually make that happen. So it's a good addition if you have accessories like clocks or radios that require constant power. Another good one, if you don't want the Knob style, you can put in like a switch that you can hide down onto the fender well, or inside the engine compartment. And just, with the turn of the Knob, you've got it disconnected on or off. I have a switch like this in my trailer that I operate my winch with. I have a battery in the trailer, my enclosed trailer, that I can easily make the connection, and visually I know it's connected. And when I'm not using the winch and the battery's just sitting there, I can make it complete. I know there's no connection going on and I have no risk of the battery short circuiting or catching on fire in the trailer. Another common one for racers is this a keyed switch? And when it's off, you can actually plug it up. There's no way to actually turn the disconnect back on. When you're ready to have power, you simply insert the key. Turn it on and you have power to all your systems. You know, there's also a wealth of new ones coming on the market all the time. There's a new one out now that just remotely works with a key fob, so you don't have to climb under the hood or do anything else. You'd just press the lever on your key fob, and you can have an led that comes on in the dash, that lets you know, that it's disconnected or connected. So with that, you really want to take a look at The different types of battery disconnects that are out there, and find the one that will best work for your situation. With that, let's do a basic install of a Knob style on our 57 DeSoto. For our install, we're gonna be doing... Using just the battery doctor Knob style disconnect. And we're also gonna put in the bypass, and as I mentioned earlier, this is so or that our clock in the dash keeps running and keeps accurate time. We don't have to reset it every time we get in the car. To begin with, we'll kind of line everything up, we've got typically, you know, your battery disconnect or it goes on the negative post. You don't want the positive post because you wanna always disconnect your battery from the ground. And we'll start by first getting the... The new battery cable connected to the disconnect. And because we're putting in this bypass, we're gonna pull off the nut on the bypass, put on our bypass wire, and I'm ready to tighten that up. You don't have to get overly tight on with any kind of battery connection. You don't need to really crank on it so hard that you start deforming the led fittings. You just want them good and tight so that like the fitting itself doesn't move anymore. Okay. Next, what we're going to do is, we're going to take the nut off this connection here, add our bypass wire to that, then put the nut back on. Now ready to complete this install. We've got the... We can now hook up our positive cable onto the battery. And it's just that simple to give our system, theft, fire, and you know, a little bit of battery protection with only a few minutes of our time. Good investment, If you don't have battery disconnect, you should really think about getting one.