So I bought a nice looking gounding kit off e-bay about a year ago, and it's been sitting with my car stuff ever since,
Looked good. Aluminum grounding block and battery terminal, 4 gauge wires...

Well, I was finally going to install it while doing work on my car over the last 4 days.

I opened up the box and discovered... The aluminum block and terminal are ANODIZED!!!

WTF???!!!

For any of you who don't know, anodidizing aluminum makes it a VERY poor conductor...

In order to get the kit working, I'm going to have to sand off the anodizing where the connectors go...

 

time to get out the dremel...

 

Aluminum oxide is poorly conductive as well. That's why most electronics don't use aluminum and the reason you should never buy a mid-80s Audi or VW.

 

I'm not woried about the aluminum oxidizing...
I was just going to use a dab of di-electric grease at all the connection points.

 

damn that sucks. well you could always see if you can get a hold of a small peice of sheet copper. and make basicly a gasket for the connections. it will give it a bigger surface area contact to the alum.

 

So they annodize the whole thing and then dont bother to remove it at the electrical contact points.

 

Nah... I like the look of the Anodized aluminum, I'll just have to dremel around the contacts...

 

Sometimes people do the stupidest things.

 

Yeah... checking E-bay now, the same company that made mine, has a new version of the kit with a steel plate instead of the alum... doesn't look as good, but I guess they had a few complaints...