Shipping was $41.50 to my Chicago suburb, delivery 3 weeks.
It is sealed and maintenance free, says “Do not add acid or water” about 5 or 6 times in the instructions. Yet the tops unscrew and inside it looks just like normal non-sealed batteries. I think it might in reality be made by Odyssey because Antique put some of Odyssey’s charger literature in the box.
So now I am going to make cables. I have the helmet ends, so I might as well make them like the originals. The manual shows pictures of the negative cable going to the solenoid, and I can see it is round and cloth braided with a helmet end. I suppose it should be black cloth braid.
What about the positive cable? It is not shown in the manual or the owners handbook. I know it goes to a hole in the scuttle just a few inches from the positive terminal post. But what is the cable itself? Round stranded or flat braid wire? Covered in red or black cloth braid or red plastic shrink tube or no covering?
I looked through my collection of photos of unrestored cars and all I found was red plastic or flat braid with no covering and bolt type clamps, which I believe are not original. There is a photo in Joseph Wherry’s book but all I can see is the helmet end.
So has anyone seen an original C.2663 (Lucas 812605) positive (i.e. earth or ground) cable for a Mark V?
The positive terminal shown in The Autocar Road Test 8th July 1949 appears to show the helmet connector attached to a naked braid that I think is flat. (Car reg. March 1949.)
The MkV (Nov 1950) that I was involved with for a short time was unrestored. It did not have a helmet connector on the positive terminal. It had a short flat naked cable with bolt clamp so there may have been various configurations. It looked the same as that fitted to 623053 (XK) on page 131 of Allan Crouch’s book although unlike that car mine had a helmet on the negative terminal.
Thanks Peter.
If you are looking at an original copy of the Autocar maybe your picture is better than my Brooklands reprint, but anyway I see the helmet but not enough of the cable to determine anything.
Your flat braid and bolt clamp are the same as I have found in pix of several unrestored and a couple of restored cars, and I see it is also on the ex-Lyons XK engined 623053. Always on the positive, but the negative often seems to still have the helmet.
One could make two contrasting conclusions about that:
The cables supplied by Lucas varied…or…
The helmet cable tended to break or corrode on the positive side, people thought they could get a better connection using the bolt clamp type, and in the 50s aftermarket trade it was universally available with flat braid.
But Lucas defended their helmet lug in their published manuals.
It occurred to me to look at XK120 and Mark VII, and I find they had helmet lugs.
The helmet lug is designed to be soldered to round cable, rather than flat.
As always, more observations are welcome.
So unless there is any more information forthcoming, I will copy the XK120 ground cable, round braided wire not covered.
But I think it needed to be longer for 120, and is unnecessarily long for Mark V, which may explain the difference in part number, otherwise they would have used the Mark V cable in 120s.
My copy of The Autocar road test is from Brooklands Books. Here’s the image that makes me think that the cable is an uninsulated flat braid. If it were of circular cross section I would not expect to see a large change of diameter after leaving the terminal and if that change were to be due to insulation I would expect to see a colour change.
Hi Rob, here are pictures of the 1950 Mark V saloon battery cables I have. The positive ground cable is the short braid piece. The negative terminal wire wore out in the manner you can see in the photo, which also shows the insulating layers. I can post a photo of the lug ends if needed. Mk V Negative Battery Cable|281x500
Okay, so the photo above is the positive ground lead. The negative battery cable file looks like is named but not displayed. Here is a second try for the negative battery cable.
Ok this is turning out to be an interesting research topic.
Roger’s positive cable is obviously very old, and looks like several others I have seen on Mark Vs.
Here is the photo from Wherry’s book Jaguar Story. Publishing date is 1967 but date of photo is unknown.
There’s a good photo of the MkV production line in 1950 on page 137 of Barrie Price’s book. It definitely shows helmet positive cables but it’s not clear enough to say whether flat or round cable.
Ok I see in that photo on the two Mark V bodies in the foreground the earth cables are drooping down. It could be inferred from that small evidence that the cable is fine strand braided wire like the grounding straps we have across the engine mounts, i.e. not heavier stranded twisted wire such as is used on the starter motor.
And here are grounding straps not connected to the batteries. The C.2612 Earth-Lead from Engine to Frame on my car matches the Earth Strap as shown in Plate B.42 of the Service Manual. The grounding strap from Body to Engine has differences even though it is supposed to be a C.2612 also. Maybe there were variations on C.2612 or maybe the Body to Engine strap was a replacement at a later date… I have not found later Lucas pricing or supercession numbers. Both of my battery straps do not match some details in
Thanks, Roger.
Here is one of my C.2612 earth leads.
The wire has 16 bunches of 15 strands of .012" diameter wire, which, near as I can make out, translates to 2 AWG 240/28 wire gauge.
Can anyone confirm or correct that size?
I think it likely that the original battery positive cable was this size.
You have just answered what would have been my next question, the body to engine lead location is at the bell housing and the nearest 5/16" hole in the scuttle.
I now remember the story. When I bought the car in 1969 the cable was dangling where it should be but the helmet end was missing. Some previous owner had rigged up an aftermarket ground to the engine that was also beat up. I took them both off and put on a new ground to the correct location on the body and threw the old ones in a box. Over time more old parts accumulated in the box and the cable lay at the bottom. Amazing that I saved it all those years.
Here are some words of caution for anyone else that may do this in the future.
Helmet prep: The positive helmet as received was the same cup size as the negative, would not fit the positive battery terminal. I had to carve it out with a pocket knife to get it to fit right.
More Helmet Prep: With both helmets the socket holes were 1/4" while the cables were 9/32", would not fit, so I drilled them out to 9/32".
Helmet Soldering: Set up the helmet in a bench vise, socket up, cable inserted and supported so it doesn’t swing or move. Use a propane torch with very low flame and heat only the cable, not the helmet. I discovered the melting temperature of the helmet is higher than the solder, which is good, but its not a lot higher so be careful. Feed in resin core solder. My ground cable was already tinned so it was easy to solder. My negative was new and clean so the resin core solder worked great.
Battery Drilling: Mark the center of the battery terminals with a center punch through the holes in the helmets. The screws from Moss were #10 sheet metal or self tapping screws .184 diameter, so I selected a .154 drill bit. Do this in a drill press if you can, rather than a hand held drill, because this soft lead alloy material is REALLY GRABBY, worse than copper. Take it real slow and careful on your down pressure, pulling the bit out to clean it often, because the scarf will bind it up, and you don’t want to take a chance breaking a bit which will get stuck in there. Guess how I know. Well, I wasn’t about to throw out a brand new $330 battery, so I was able to drill 4 little holes all around my broken bit and pulled it out with needle nose pliers, but it left a big crater. I was able to fill it with solid core solder using a wand type electric soldering iron, again being fortunate that the melting temperature of the solder was less than that of the terminal but it was all clean metal so it all stuck together.
Starting the Screws: Take it real slow, a quarter turn at a time and backing off, like tapping a thread, because that is essentially what you are doing.
Screw Head Type: I think the original screws were probably oval head, because the helmets have a tapered hole, but the screws provided by Moss were pan head, so I put them in the lathe and cut a taper on them so they will contact the helmets better.
That broken bit made me think maybe this was the reason these helmets never really caught on with the general automotive world, so much trouble to drill the terminals, and the hazard of broken bits.
Mk IVs had the earth terminal also just attached to the firewall. Which seemed to often cause the paint to flake around that point. So we put another earth cable from the inside end of that bolt under the firewall, down to the chassis rail . And that seems to have stopped the problem.
