March 29, 2025

Today was one of those classic old car days — the kind where everything looks fine, right up until it absolutely isn’t.

As we learned last time: Emma, my ’65 Mustang, refused to start. Turn the key, and all I got was a click — a good, hearty clunk, but no vroom. No starter spin. No life. And then — because she’s dramatic — all the cabin power vanished like I’d offended her somehow.

I ran through the usual suspects:

• Battery voltage steady at 12.6V.
• Starter bench-tested just fine — spun like it meant it.
• Engine crank turned manually — no seizure.
• Jumped 12V directly to the S-terminal on the solenoid — same sad click.
• Ran jumper cables from the battery positive to the starter side of the solenoid — nothing.

I even pulled the damn starter and reinstalled it to re-test. Still nothing. At this point, Emma had me thinking maybe the solenoid was failing under load, or maybe there was a bad ground. The forums love bad grounds.

So I went digging for the ancient grounding strap, which, according to Ford lore, runs from the back of the passenger-side cylinder head to the firewall. Found it. Questioned it. But then it hit me — I was assuming my ground was fine just because it should be.

So I ran the full battery bypass test:

• Battery negative clamped directly to the starter case
• Battery positive clamped directly to the starter lug

She cranked. Slowly. Like a wounded animal crawling toward death — but it was movement.

Voltage under crank dropped to 10.6V — not catastrophic, but clearly struggling. Now it’s between the starter being a power-hungry dinosaur, or the battery being a lying sack of volts.

Spoiler alert: It was the battery.

Threw in a random O’Reilly special, and Emma fired up like she’d never been mad at me. The old battery is less than a year old and has been disconnected every night like clockwork. I thought I was doing everything right. But no — she sat there quietly draining herself into oblivion, probably laughing every time I walked by.

O’Reilly is charging the old battery and pretending to run a real load test with whatever pocket-sized Magic 8 Ball they use back there, but I already know how this ends. Sulfated plates, maybe a bunk cell, possibly just a bad batch. Either way, I’m done trusting surface voltage alone.

Emma’s alive, for now. I’m slightly more dead inside. But hey — the starter’s good, the solenoid’s not lying, and we’ve all learned a little something about batteries that talk a big game and fold under pressure.