You bet!

VW Pickup page

Tipped the scales. Guess I'll have to revisit the welding supply shop. I'll save some bucks and put in quick disconnects in Revision 1.2 <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/notooth.gif" alt="" />

You bet.

At 12 vdc, that's not a danger unless I strike an arc near the fuel tank. Will employ countermeasures.

As far as wiring, just move to Denver and I'll wire up your garage for ya. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/evil.gif" alt="" /> Worked on plenty of panels, hot or not.

Hey Bill-

Not to hi-jack this, but it's kinda looped into the dual battery setup....

I don't want to spend the $$$ for an isolator like the Hell Roaring system, and I see your setting up a constant duty soliniod to connect them.

How are you charging the dual battery system off the alternator? I plan on running dual batteries after I get a used Warn 8274 later this year. The second battery is going behind the cab, under the flat bed.

Thanks

Mark

Not sure of Bill's setup, but I run a 350A solenoid on mine (Painless Wiring dual battery kit) and in normal mode, solenoid is on whenever the ignition is on and both batteries automagically charge when the solenoid is connecting them in parallel. Turn engine off, solenoid drops out and now I have two separate bateries. Main battery dies and I flip a switch to turn on the solenoid off the 2nd battery and I give myself a jump start:

dial battery install

And here's a photo of one of the connectors (middle-right), a +12V binding post (middle-left) and at the far left, you can just see where the ground cable run along the frame to terminate at one common bolt:



With the pair of disconnects, I can isolate the batteries from the rest of the truck, swap them for main/aux. use (I do this every few years to even the load on them), or tie in jumper cables to combine them in series for 24V. Makes for a very flexible and reliable system.

I would mount the solenoid at the batteries so that you are minimizing the number of long lengths of positive wire. Then you just have one short wire that connects the two batteries via a solenoid and one long wire that runs up to the front of the truck to power your stuff. You can power the solenoid off of the reserve battery and then run a small fused wire to a switch in the cab and/or your ignition.

In terms of the ground, I would ground the batteries in several places just to be safe. Ground at the frame near the batteries and also run another wire up the front to ground there and on the engine block. If you are using the batteries to power your ignition, you can then be sure you have good current.

Running long positive wires under your chassis is very dangerous. One thing I did to help minimize any shorting out problems, which can lead to fire, is run the wire through heater hose. The Heater hose is big enough to accept pretty large wire and will give pretty significant protection to the wire.

You should also consider running a fusable link at the batteries for ulimate protection. Wrangler NW sells 200 amp continous fusable links, which would be enough for anything except maybe winching.

Hope I didn't just repeat what everyone else said, I didn't have time to read the entire thread.

Good luck.

Of all the people that should, or even could, answer this post, I'm not him....but.....

It occurs to me you definately want atleast 2 ground points. One to the body and one to the engine. The motor and tranny mounts have rubber isolators in them, so without the engine block being grounded your motor would never turn over....and remember the motor should have like a 4 gauge ground wire going to it alone. I imagine you would have the same problem with all the other electrical items since they are grounded to the body and not the frame....and the frame is isolated too.....although the body mount bolts might complete that curcuit.

Anyway.....just a rookie's prespective

There are several body-frame, engine-frame and engine-body ground straps and wires. I left all these intact on my setup, except that I changed the main body-engine strap to a heavier 1/0 cable and that connected that to the same point my other ground cables came up to. Since the starter is the heaviest engine load, the 1/0 cable from the block to ground should handle that. On the way up from the batteries, I reversed the factory wiring a bit, in that I ran the main battery 12V cable to the starter first then up to the engine fuse box. That really seemed to help the starter motor crank over the engine faster. It'll now easily start the truck in 1st gear high range, before only would start it in 1st gear, low range.

Yes, lots of ways to wire batteries up, depends on where they are, how easy it is to get to them and what you want the end system to do.

Brian mentioned fuses.

If you should decide to use one of those, check the specs on the fuse. A standard ANL 200A fuse will carry at least 200A indefinitely (I think its about 110% of rating). From the curves on the Bussman web page , it looks like it will carry over 300A for at least 100Sec before blowing, and takes 10Sec to blow at 400A. If you put in a 400A fuse thinking thats what you need because the winch draws that much, at around 700A it will take a couple of minutes to blow so the winch motor may go first. It takes over 1500A to blow a 400A fuse in 1 second. Just some fuse trivia for the day.