Odyssey PC680
Yup, PC680, now checked out by the Odyssey folks and be-knighted AOK.
In all honesty, when I did the heater I went to the smaller battery and moved it to the front side of the front well, thereby needing about 18" more in the positive cable. Being a true New England Yankee (read that, "cheap") I added what length I needed with a commercial grade butt splice in the cable, all the while wondering if it would work reliably.
It doesn't. A single, un-spliced cable might be fine, but I don't really know.
So I can spring for a new 12' of 2 gauge cable (I originally used welding cable but that stuff is now expensive) or I can relocate the battery to the rear and run a new feeder to the fuse/relay box. Either way, it costs about the same and I trust the shorter cable to the starter much more. Either way is pretty easy to do.
Life is the adventure..........
Apparently one has to be careful what charger is used with these Odyssey batteries. I just bought one of the new Odyssey chargers.
You can buy that battery under a lot of names and as far as I know they all seem to be decent quality. They pack a lot of punch, I put one in my 69 Camaro with an 11 to 1 compression 427 in it and that little battery spun it over like the plugs were out. It lasted over 10 years. It was called a Dyna Batt. If you check online you can get them pretty cheaply.
Gordon, you could play some cable games before you move the battery.
Try running a dedicated 2 gauge ground wire from the starter back to the battery.
Try doubling up the 2 gauge cable (two in parallel) to see if that makes a difference.
It seems like if the battery is grounded to the car frame near where it is and the starter is grounded to the car frame near where it is you wouldn't need the ground cable from the starter to the battery.
Michael McKelvey posted:It seems like if the battery is grounded to the car frame near where it is and the starter is grounded to the car frame near where it is you wouldn't need the ground cable from the starter to the battery.
With electrics, what oughta be, sometimes ain't.
I thought it would be a quick and dirty test to eliminate any potential grounding issues.
And now the engineers are snickering over 'potential grounding issues'.
Snicker, snicker....... Nope, I'm not an engineer - closer to an economist.
"Try running a dedicated 2 gauge ground wire from the starter back to the battery.
Try doubling up the 2 gauge cable (two in parallel) to see if that makes a difference."
Both excellent ideas, actually, until the harsh reality of the Chinese gobbling up all of the copper they can find and driving the price of 2 gauge power cables sky high.
That "test" would cost somewhere around $50 bucks, just for the cable, if I can find it at a cheap place. Welding cable (which has finer strands and bends super-easy) is easily 2-3X that.
Anyway, everything my Economist background 
tells me (along with the local battery guy and the Odyssey support tech) that the shorter cables will work because the resistance of the 3' length of cable will now be 75% less than before (at 12'). IIRC, there's also something about resistance being non-linear over greater lengths, but that could well be spurious theories of international monetary flow creeping into the algorithm. Or maybe it's because current at radio frequencies flows along the surface of the conductor or something like that, I can't remember.
BTW: the "680" in the model number tells us that the battery is capable of providing 680 amps of cranking power for the first ten seconds (and then it drops off logarithmically. Why Logarithmically? I dunno....It's an engineering/Odyssey thing)
Mike: I had an old Schlumberger trickle charger handy and used that (got it at Walmart). True, the Odyssey tech sheets have this really involved charging sequence (obviously developed either by a designer with too much time on his/her hands or a summer engineering intern trying to impress) but when I popped a digital voltmeter on it and watched what was going on, the Schlumberger thingie charged it within +/- 10% of the spec so I thought that was fine. After all, I'm not an engineer, just a lowly Business major. We partied most of the time.
Gordon, you surprise me.
Can't someone who engineered his own gas heating system and figured out how to make Jon Voight's car seats fit in a Speedster come up with a nice, cheap, kludgy workaround for a test?
Doncha got a set of jumper cables you could use to ground the starter to the battery?
Jumper cables? That to simple...
Meh.
My gut is telling me shorter cables, testing be damned. Plus, I already have this yuuuuuge! battery cable going from the starter to the front, and I can easily relocate it to run the fuse/relay panel (brighter lights!!) so this is a relatively easy upgrade. Besides, it gets the battery out of the front well and makes the heater look more prominent (figuratively speaking). Unfortunately, it all keeps me off the road for a few more days.....
And I don't think it was Jon Voight's seats.....Maybe Ricardo Montalban? Or maybe it was the width of a seat to fit Jon Voight's butt ? 