Well this morning I went and started the Montero and it did fire up nicely but then in a few seconds it started to idle rough so I turned it off. I cranked the Montero again and it fired up again and idled roughly so I shut it down again. The third time I started the Montero, nothing happened, all of my lights inside and outside the vehicle just shutdown. I heard no click from the starter, the dome light nor the radio would turn on.
This afternoon I went to the battery wiggled the red cable a little bit and the Montero started right up.

I did some heavy traveling this weekend, I put around 800 miles in the Montero so I do not know if this could of caused something for it to behave like this.

Any one would like to speculate on what could of happened and if there is a fix to it.

if you can wiggle your battery cable it is loose. that is why it is acting the way it is, my LS did the same thing when my dad test drove it before he bought it. the salesman popped the hood, checked the cables, tightened them up, never had a problem in the last 60k miles. battery terminals should be tightened, they are not meant to be loose so much that they can be wiggled, it makes for poor connections.

Good point, but I forgot to mention that my battery terminals are tight, it was the rest of the red cable that I wiggled. I heard some strange noises like static or something. Could I have a short somewhere?

it sounds like you have a broken wire somewhere that is making a poor connection. need to find out where and fix it.

Ditto what Scottie said. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/kewl.gif" alt="" />

You could also still be having dirty battery connections, It's a few bucks for the terminal cleaner tool, and it's always good to have those connections clear.

Once you use the battery cleaner, soak the terminals and cable ends in baking soda paste to neutralize the acid, then rinse. I've used dialectric grease when returning the cable to the terminals. Best thing I did was to get rid of the liquid acid battery, no problmes with my Optima. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I happened to have the same problem today when I went to leave work. Thing is I just cleaned the terminals this past weekend so I think I just need some new ones. One of them will barely tighten down enough to stay tight on the post. Where is it everyone buys those fancy marine ones? I could always go for the auto parts store cheapies, but I've always had trouble with the cheap routes <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/drunk.gif" alt="" />

Westmarine.com....I like the gold ones <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/zombie.gif" alt="" />

bling bling

I have also noticed that if the terminals barely tighten down on the posts, then the battery you have isn't even heavy duty enough like the Mitsu engineers had hoped would be in there. Some batteries have bigger posts than others, and the Mitsu guys put big terminals in the montero b/c they wanted a bigger battery than just a regular car battery with regular posts. When I bought my LS, it had small car battery in it, I had the problem you speak of, terminals would barely get tight enough to snug down, but I put in the biggest battery that would fit in the tray using all my tray space, and those terminals were big enough to tighten them down real good.