G'day Paul,



12 Mar 97 23:06, Paul Edwards wrote to Rod Gasson:



 RG>> Your battery only has one earth, doesn't it???

 PE> I didn't think it had any.



Oh. :-(



 PE>>> Why do I have a faulty earth contact,

 RG>> Because it has probably never been cleaned.

 PE> Fair enough.



:-)



 PE>>> and where is it?



 RG>> On the battery...  the terminal marked "-"



 PE> That's the negative terminal.  Why are you calling it "earth"?



Because that's what it is (as opposed to "ground").  Almost all

vehicles these days you -ve earth, although in the past some of them

used +ve earth.



 PE>>> Can you tell this from the fact that it's hot?



 RG>> Can we tell it is a faulty contact from the fact it's getting

 RG>> hot? Sure we can - a good contact doesn't get hot.



 PE> I had imagined that the battery was fucked up inside, and some

 PE> chemical reaction was happening all by itself, and making the

 PE> negative terminal hot.



If this were the case, I'd expect the entire battery to get hot, not

just one of the terminals.



 PE>>> I'll have to see if my new battery is also hot.



 RG>> The battery shouldn't get hot at all (unless you're overcharging

 RG>> it). The terminal on your new battery shouldn't get hot like the

 RG>> old one, 'cos I assume that when you change it you'll be cleaning

 RG>> the contacts.



 PE> You assumed wrong.  I didn't know to do that.



You may be lucky anyway...  the new battery will already have clean

contacts, and the act of replacing it will almost certainly cause you

to tighten the contacts.

Cleaning them, and keeping them clean is a good idea though... as is

smearing the terminals with vaseline.



 PE> BTW, did you get my message on my apparently-bust CMD hard drive?



Err, no.



 PE> Regardless, I have an additional question - are those CMD people

 PE> still contactable in the Commodore echos?



Sure...   but you'll need to address it to Doug Cotton rather than

CMD, as he is the only one from the company that reads the echos.



 PE> If so, which one, I

 PE> haven't seen much traffic in the one I've got tagged (64_TALK).  BFN.



64_Talk is Australian only... to contact Doug you'll need to post in

the CBM or CBM-128 echos.

There is no guarantee that he'll answer or even see your message

though, 'cos he only seems to read the echo's on a very irregular

basis.



What's your problem with it anyway?   There is nothing really

'special' about their drives... in fact the mech itself is a standard

SCSI type. Their custom controllers seem to be very reliable.



Cheers,

Rod



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