I've had a restored 64 falcon ranchero for a couple of years. It is a straight six with a generator, not altenator. The odd thing is the positive battery terminal is grounded to the block and the negative terminal hooks to the starting solenoid. The Shop Manual indicates the original set up was negative ground and positive to the starter circuit.

Why would someone switch the factory set up?

 

Maybe dyslexia?

 

I assume:

The Battery was dead

or

The Battery was blown apart

or

The fusible links were fried !

 

some people are just stupid, plain and simple.
with a generator, it is easy to do the pos ground thing.
to switch it back to negative ground, you will need to switch the cables. if you can not re-energize the current voltage regulator, you may have to get a new one.

 

Some of the old time 6 volt systems were positive ground back in the 50's and earlier. They found out later they got much better ignition performance using a negative ground tho so that is the way everything has been wired since. If some addle brained geezer even older than me wired it back up after a major mess he may have wired it the "old" way.

 

hello there, just a couple of questions. Does the truck run with it hooked up that way? Does it charge the battery? R u positive {no pun intended} you looked at it correctly? What i mean by that is that maybe whom ever had it b 4 u might have put new battery cables on it and just hooked up them in reverse[color code] black to pos- red to neg? just a thought!

 

All Fords were positive ground till 1956.

 

kbolk, I does run, just hard to start which often kills the battery. It is hooked backward, I just went out and checked again. Guess there is no telling why the previous owner did it in reverse. Doesn't look like there will be any harm in switching it back, and from one of the post it may even improve the startability. Thanks for the replies.

 

Thanks, I did not know precisely when Ford made the change.