1997 corvette LS1 alternator battery problems please help
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Joined: Jul 2014
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From: Birmingham AL
1997 corvette LS1 alternator battery problems please help Ok so about a week ago my car got a "charge system failure" message. I did some research and decided it probably wasn't a big deal so I kept driving..
Couple days later I'm driving down the road, and my front speakers go out.. So I'm thinking it must be a ground wire behind my radio. So I'm in the middle of nowhere so I keep going. About a mile later, all my lights start flashing, and everything on my instrument cluster(all the gauges) start going from 0/200, bouncing back and forth. It was Crazy. So I was about to pull over and then engine shuts off. I was luckily able to coast into a parking spot at a dollar general. I then sat for a minute, tried cranking my car and got the dead battery clicking. The whole time I was thinking it was my alternator. But somehow I had some corvette guys convince me I had a bad battery, so I went and bought a new battery. Car drove great all the way home until I got another charger system failure. Next day I took it on 2 60mile trips and it drive fine but I noticed when I was driving at night my lights weren't very bright, and my voltage was only at 10.5> volts.
Since then I've taken my alternator off, taken it to an alternator shop. Had the guy take it apart and check it out and showed me that it is working. (He had a machine show me).
Couple days later I'm driving down the road, and my front speakers go out.. So I'm thinking it must be a ground wire behind my radio. So I'm in the middle of nowhere so I keep going. About a mile later, all my lights start flashing, and everything on my instrument cluster(all the gauges) start going from 0/200, bouncing back and forth. It was Crazy. So I was about to pull over and then engine shuts off. I was luckily able to coast into a parking spot at a dollar general. I then sat for a minute, tried cranking my car and got the dead battery clicking. The whole time I was thinking it was my alternator. But somehow I had some corvette guys convince me I had a bad battery, so I went and bought a new battery. Car drove great all the way home until I got another charger system failure. Next day I took it on 2 60mile trips and it drive fine but I noticed when I was driving at night my lights weren't very bright, and my voltage was only at 10.5> volts.
Since then I've taken my alternator off, taken it to an alternator shop. Had the guy take it apart and check it out and showed me that it is working. (He had a machine show me).
Thread Starter
Registered User
Joined: Jul 2014
Posts: 5
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From: Birmingham AL
I know this may be a crazy question... But would it be okay for me to ground something to the actual negative side of the battery? A lot like you do when hooking up amp but this time using the negative side. The previous owner rigged up some ground locations
As long as you are going ground to ground you can run anything you like as long as it's rated for the amperage going through it. The negative side post should already have a cable or multiple cables running to the chassis/engine block and it would only take one with a poor connection to potentially cause problems.
