<VV> What *could* be damaged by reversing the battery?

[Tony Underwood]

At 04:42 hours 08/23/2005, Bill Elliott wrote:
>On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:54:04 -0700, Tony Underwood wrote:
>
> >At 01:41 hours 08/23/2005, LonzoVair at aol.com wrote:
> >>Hey guys,
> >>I just found a nice Corvair, but the idiot owner has installed the battery
> >>positive ground... what could possibly be broken/burnt up?
>
>
>With British cars (positive ground in some cases anyway) reverse 
>hookups are the normal course of
>events. If left for long the battery (and maybe the fuel gauge) will 
>be dead and if it was an alternator
>instead of a a generator it will likely be dead as well.
>
>I have a Mini that would have originally been positive ground that 
>was imported without a battery, so we
>really had no idea if it had been converted. The fuel pump works 
>either way, the wiper motor was already
>dead, the fuel gauge didn't work... so we hooked it up as a negative 
>ground and just went with it. So far,
>so good.


One of my brothers (half-brother and also a nimrod) bought a '64 Vair 
500 coupe from the insurance man (who had Vairs and '62 V6 Buick 
Specials) and bro had to buy a battery for it, ran it about 7 months 
before ramming a bridge abutment with it and pretty much ruined the 
car.    I ended up with it... still started and ran etc but the front 
end was wiped out.    The car was pretty much parts, (had plywood 
floors) so I began dismantling it... and noticed that the battery was 
in backwards and had been since bro' had bought the battery 7 months 
before.   His only complaint was that the radio never worked after he 
put the battery in the car.    Fuse was blown.

The car had run for 7 months with the battery in backwards, and it 
was charging the battery (generators do this sort of thing) just fine 
the whole time.   Of course, since nothing in the car was 
polarity-specific-damageable (radio was inop) it ran just fine the 
whole time and bro was never the wiser (and still isn't).

You could get away with this in an early model...  but not anything 
with an alternator.    However, a generator will usually repolarize 
itself and not think twice.


tony..