Friday, September 30, 2005

The Straight Dope: Is it dangerous to jump start a dead battery? (Especially the way most guys do it?)

The Straight Dope: Is it dangerous to jump start a dead battery? (Especially the way most guys do it?):
"Some nontrivial number of people gets injured by exploding car batteries each year. Doesn't that mean you should follow the seven pages of instructions in the manual despite what the boys think? For insight I called up the service manager for a car dealership. Did he know the correct procedures? He sure did. Did he and his crew follow them? They sure didn't. His main beef was that if you attached the last clamp to some remote point on the body of the dead car, you didn't deliver enough juice to crank the engine. My excuse for ignoring the procedure is similar: You often don't get a good connection due to crud on the terminals, so you have to jiggle the clamps, most of which are unavoidably on battery terminals, till you see sparks. Is this a dangerous, stupid, typically guylike thing to do? Yeah. But nine times out of ten we'll be able to start your car."

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