Today I Learned as they say. Thanks.
Hmm, well, the thing I ordered failed to work the first time, alas. I’d fully charged it the night before, and the light was green and everything so I don’t know what happened. The engine barely started to crank, then nothing.
The car I’m trying to start is a 2001 Jetta sedan. I tried seeing if I could hook up some jumper cables but I now couldn’t locate a good spot under the hood to serve as a ground, within reach of the black clamp. I know you’re not supposed to hook the black clamp to the receiving battery’s negative pole (or does that not apply if you hook up the black clamp on the other end, on the ground stud, as the last thing?).
Oh man i always hook up neg to neg and positive to positive. If you don’t you’re just charging the battery. I used to do the clamp the negative to the car body thing and it would take 20 minutes to jump.
I mean to be clear, i always clamp on the wires connecting the battery to the car directly.
There is no difference between clamping the negative terminal and clamping the frame, except for where you risk making sparks. There is literally a cable (ground strap) that connects the frame directly to the negative terminal of the battery.
OK, so given that, when doing a jump I can theoretically clamp + to + poles first with red clamps, then - pole on the receiving battery with one black clamp and finally the other black clamp on my C300’s special ground stud. No danger of a spark near any battery.
You should generally attach both terminals on the live battery at the same time. If you connect the positive and then walk away to the other car, the loose connector that you leave next to the live battery might arc and cause a short circuit. Which would be bad.
Hence:
- Positive terminal of dead battery (the battery is dead, so the cables won’t become hot)
- Walk over to the other car and secure both terminals to live battery. Positive first to get it out of the way in case the dead battery still has a weak charge. If you can find a secure part of the frame then theoretically you can use it instead of the negative terminal. But carefully consider where the negative clamp would land if it fell off
- Return to dead battery and complete circuit by clamping frame (in case the dead battery is releasing hydrogen gas)
Disconnect in reverse order
OK in a perfect world that would be great, but under the VW Jetta’s hood there is no obvious place to clamp to bare metal on the frame. Everything is just packed in so tightly that there is no access to the engine block or frame that’s not obstructed (and unlike the C300 there is no convenient ground stud like the one Guap indicated in his pic).
I’m gonna give the Weego thing another try, return it if it doesn’t work, and just call a tow truck with the money instead. They do this for a living so they should know. Also I can observe how they do it for next time.*
*I looked in the Jetta’s owners manual and it was no help nor did it have relevant pictures and there’s nothing on YT either.
I have these in all our cars, they have never failed us, been used on three or four different cars now:
I went with that one because that’s the model Scotty the Mechanic (Scotty Kilmer) recommended on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/user/scottykilmer
His titles are kind of click-baity, but if you have never watched his videos, I apologize in advance for the days you will lose down that deep, deep rabbit hole of vehicle knowledge. Nobody like a retired mechanic to tell you the truth about cars & repairs.
This is crazy that to jump a car you have to call a tow truck, but then i remember i had to find a BMW battery and it took me an hour and a long, long read through the manual.
Also i looked up how to jump start an MB C300 and your other post is like the third listed. Love people saying things like “if you ever need to jump start your car, you’re doing something wrong” as an answer.
Hehe, yeah, love those posts. They’re like those posts in gaming help forums* where you ask a question and they tell you to do the obvious thing and you’re like “DID YOU READ MY POST WHERE I EXPLAINED THAT I DID THE OBVIOUS THING???”
Aaaanyway, I finally found an image where someone starts a similar model year Golf and it looks like there’s a reinforced bit near the hood strut that counts as a grounding point.
*There was this OG Xbox James Bond game called Everything or Nothing where the Bad Bond Girl double crosses Bond (Quelle surprise!), takes off in a helicopter and Bond has to jump off a cliff with a wingsuit on or something, and when I would do it I would always hit these ledges on the way down and die. Finally I found out the secret that once the cutscene ends, the only way to succeed is to already have the left stick pointing forward before the end of the cutscene and be running toward the cliff (if you started running only immediately after the cutscene ended you’d always die), but no one thought to mention that in their answers. I must have spent a half hour beating my head against the wall on that one.
Did it work?
The fascinating thing to me is how these things change over time. When I started driving, nearly everyone had jumper cables in the car and most knew how to use them because we used them alot. Same with spare tires and jacks. Now cars are much more reliable so we do not use them, and then the car makers make them non-existent (many cars have no spare) or hard to use (your jumping example, or have you tried to use one of those compact jacks recently)
Well, I haven’t tried it yet. I looked under the hood of the Jetta again and the place I was thinking of using had paint on it, so I’m at a loss. I guess I’ll connect to there anyway and see if it works. There’s just no obvious spot to connect to for a chassis ground. I can call and ask the mechanic that used to work on the car and see what he says, I guess.
I sorta hate the plastic panels that cover the engine of so many new cars. Americans do not want to see those gross engine parts, that’s soooo pedestrian.
Well, I went ahead and used the painted hood hinge as a chassis ground, and it worked fine. Now I know.
