Hi guys

So I've been putting the rx7 together and after hooking everything up, I wanted to make sure that my gauges were working right. So the battery got hooked up and after about 10 seconds there was smoke coming from the transmission tunnel. I jacked the car up and took a look again and the rubber boots on the e brake cable were literally melting and smoking.

My friend had mentioned that on the mr2's if there was a bad ground that the throttle cable would start to burn.

Have any of you dealt with this?

The only difference in ground points that I had done was the massive ground cable that is supposed to be hooked up to the ac bracket I ended up grounding to the body.

Any insight?!? Thanks so much in advance.

Boris

 

Get a multi meter or a test light on there to see whats going on. Im no doctor, but in my medical opinion mechanical cables shouldn't be electrically hot - as in connected to +dc at all. And it must be touching something substantial that its melting stuff before blowing a fuse or a smaller wire somewhere!!! Its not touching the starter motor or something is it?!

 

Something is very wrong. The handbrake cable should not be conducting anything, and it should barely even function as a weak, weak earth path at best.

My shot in the dark guess is that the cable is acting similar to a slow blow fuse (bizarre) because there is constant (always-on/battery) +ve 12V being applied to one point of the cable somehow- chafed or rubbed through +ve battery related wiring is touching it, and the other end of the handbrake cable is grounded, so the cable then gets red hot as it is making a dead short path between +ve battery power and earth.

If there was an old stereo in the car, maybe an amplifier power wire snaked under somewhere has chafed and is rubbing the cable, etc. As you said it happened as soon as the battery was connected, its got to be a constant +ve source somewhere.

A poor earth path should not do that unless there was an electrical load/device trying to earth itself through the cable while it was running (unlikely as nothing with that big of load should be running when you just put the battery terminals on)

I would start at the e brake lever end and work back along the cable, checking for old wires and things that may be chafing on it, making the short. There will be something...

One of the weirder things I've ever heard of on any FD....

 

Well... figured out the problem, and it was REALLY stupid.
In the midst of the car being apart for close to 2 months and overall grogginess trying to put everything back together at 0300, the previous owner used a red cable for the ground off the start bolt/trans and when I put everything back together, however I mistakenly put it with the power instead of the ground, hence this ridiculous scenario I put myself in.

Once that was sorted, hooked up the battery again, and everything was 100%.

Glad it was something easy to spot once I took another look at it, but man do I feel like a dinkus.