Mind your cables!

The other day I was cruising over to see the Oilman, and just as I pulled into his driveway, my cart died. The batteries still had a good charge, so I couldn't figure out what could be happening. The Oilman and I pushed it up into the driveway, and I did my standard diagnostic procedure... I started jiggling things. I noticed that when I wiggled one of the wires, I'd see the battery level on the dash flash. When I hit each individual battery with a meter, they were each over 6 volts. Going from the start of the series to the end, however, I was getting all sorts of weird readings.

I wanted to get the cart home to the CartCave where I could examine it more closely, so the Oilman and I pushed it out into the street, and toward my house... two blocks away, and downhill from the Oilman. Thankfully he followed me in his truck, and once the cart was home, helped me push it up the driveway and into the CartCave. To diagnose the problem, I pulled out all the stops and went straight for my best resrouce... I called the Chairman.

He told me that when something like that happened to one of his carts (he has a number of them that he uses in his business), it was almost always a battery cable. In fact, one of his people had climbed onto one of his carts, backed up, and then it died. He raised the seat, started jiggling wires, and one came off in his hand. While mine weren't that bad, I thought that the cables could be the culprit. In most mechanical situations, the Chairman knows what he's talking about.

I went onto Ebay, and found a seller named "golfchargerpro" that had thousands of great reviews who was selling a cable set for the EZ-GO TXT cart that I have. The great thing about his cables is that they were soldered on the ends, not just crimped, and the set of five cables was only sixteen bucks. Cables were available for all makes and models of carts, so all you have to do is make sure that you get a set that matches your particular golf cart. The shipping was included in the price (which was pretty amazing), and in just a few days a plastic envelope showed up that containted the five cables. I replaced the cables on my cart with the news ones in about fifteen minutes, took a seat behind the wheel, and it zoomed away just fine. Clearly, one (or more) of the old cables were causing problems, and the new ones corrected that situation. They're the nice-looking blue ones in the photo below.

There is one more thing to mention, though. One of the old cables had some of that bluish-white corrosion starting to build up, and while putting on the new cables fixed that (I cleaned everything with a wire brush), I didn't want it happening in the future. I therefore went out and purchased a Battery Terminal Protector spray to put on the connections to keep out any future corrosion. I'll be keeping that on them in the future, just to make sure that battery corrosion doesn't cause a problem in the future. So as the Brits might say, "Mind your cables!"

Here's a photo of the wire ends sprayed with the Battery Terminal Protector spray...

Happy carting,
The Psychic

Click to return to the main page