What a stupid design!

[Mark Five]

I changed the car battery today. Was it easy? Yes, once I'd removed the damned vertical bolt that holds the retaining bar. You know, the one with the miniscule (8mm) bolt head that goes through the floor and gets so rusty it won't move unless you spray copious amounts of WD40 underneath the car, and have to wait 20 minutes? Yeah, that one.

It's the very same one you can't put back if the new battery is a millimetre or two bigger than the old battery..

Whatever happened to the old bar and two hooks with wing nuts!? Too simple, was it?

Rant over.. 

[JOE-DOT-COM]

hi

trick is to keep something like copper kote or copper grease on the threads and it will come out easy in the future

[Dode]

Make sure your battery is absolutely secured down.  If it can wiggle at all, you risk one of the terminals eventually shaking off, bringing the car to an immediate stop by cutting both the engine and all the electrics.  As you can probably guess, I am speaking from experience! 

[Old Peter]

I have changed the battery a couple of years ago and had no problem at all.  

I also had to replace a terminal on another occasion quite easily.

Peter.

[Oldun]

I had a battery go down when I was in Cardiff,as I cannot bend as I used to,I allowed Halfords to do the job with the result that the hold down bolt sheared off,it wasnt Halfords fault ,the bolt was well rotted in.On my return home I attempted to remove the broken bolt ,no chance.So now I have a couple of nuts well clarted with grease .I must agree that it not the best engineered bit of kit.

 

 

 

 

[Mark Five]

Thanks for the replies chaps.

My changing the battery (for the first time since acquiring the car) was to attempt to remedy the frequent 'gearbox fault' the car was experiencing - it hadn't failed, but was simply a few years old. It seems that whatever voltage was available was used to start the engine, possibly at the expense of other electronics and software. Happily, it seems the problem has now been cured.

Until I can find a way of shrinking the battery by a couple of millimetres I've packed some support on either side of the battery - and when the shrinking happens I'll replace the 'clamp' with copious amounts of thread protection.