Finish a job yesterday and go to start my 98 F-150...4.6 and get the dreaded click. All has been fine. Firewall relay clicking, so crawl underneath in the slop and snow and the main battery wire corroded off the starter solinoid. Go back up top and turn the key to run position, crawl back underneath and short that wire to the other main terminal that feeds the 12 volts into the starter. Truck starts right up. That gets me home, I found a 4 gauge lug in my electrical stuff, clean up the wire and crimp it on ( actually a smoosh with a vice-grip cause my crimper won't get in there and trying to solder in that position wasn't gonna' work). Has anyone replace that cable and how hard was it to pull it out of that loom that it shares with other wires? I was thinking just run a seperate cable in a new loom and zip tie it to the other loom? I was guessing it is 2 gauge? Looks like about 4' would be enough to go from the battery to the starter. As usual...thanks for any and all advice...

 

It's 4 gauge on my '97. If I were working in your climate and conditions (I'm glad I'm NOT, anymore!), I would go with running the new wire in a separate plastic loom, zip-tied to the original loom, kept off of the exhaust. Use the black zip ties, as the natural nylon ones are not UV-resistant (if ya ever get sun in MN ). Brrrrrrr!

 

If its the black cable, it runs from the starter to the starter relay, not to the battery.

 

It was the big red wire on the starter solinoid that rotted out. If I understand it right ...the 12 volt positive on the battery has 2 leads coming off it. The large lead goes right to the solinoid on the starter...the smaller lead goes to the relay on the firewall. The relay on the firewall has a wire coming into from the ignition. when you turn the key that energizes the relay and takes power form the 12 volt positve terminal on that relay and moves it to the smaller wire that in turn runs down to the starter solinoid. That gets energized and moves 12 volts positive from the large wire (that rotted off) over to the starter motor and she turns over. I think this is right because i got it started by turning the ignition to "run" and then going back underneath and touching the burned off wire directly onto the other large lug that feeds directly into the starter motor. Sound correct?

I saw a 2 gauge wire with heavy duty eyelets on it today...51" long. Both end had eyelets....so on one end i thought I could cut it off and then put that along with the smaller wire into a new battery terninal. Then run that thru a new loom along side the existing one. The wire was like $10.00 bucks and a new HD terminal like $3.50. I dunno'....the new end will be OK for a while...but not something I want to leave.