Decided to take the truck out over the weekend as I haven't driven it for about 2 months. I was able to start it, loaded up and headed out to a friend's house to pick up her junk before we headed to the dump. Loaded her crap and when I went to start it, the truck wouldn't start... nothing, no click, no radio, lights, no nothing. No juice showing on the voltage guage either. Called a friend and told him what was going on... he said to try to jump it, so I attached the jumper cables (and yes, they were on there right -- I double checked) and was on my way back around to get in the truck and my friend started yelling "THEY'RE SMOKING!!!" Booked it around to the front of the truck... the battery and the jumper cables were smoking!!! I burned the crap outta my hand when I yanked them off of there, too. My friend ended up coming out to take a look. He poked around a bit and then hooked his jumper cables to my truck and then the negative to his truck. When he went to attach the positive side, it was arcing (sp?) and he said that something was "drawing" on my truck. Then he disconnected my battery and hooked the jumper cables just to the positive and negative cables. I tried again and it turned over. He concluded that the battery had "shorted out". Went to town, bought a new battery, threw it in and drove home.
I guess the question would be... what could cause my battery to turn on me like that? Just a bad battery? Not starting it for 2 months? What could have shorted it out? Is that even possible? What gives -- I've never heard of that before? It's fixed for now, but I want to be aware of a possible cause in order to prevent this from happening again (very scary). Sorry for the novel, but I wanted to relay as much info as possible...
EDIT: The battery was a 3 year old, "no maintenance" battery.
<font color=green>Cheryle</font color=green><P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by shewheeler on 01/15/02 12:24 PM.</FONT></P>
I guess the question would be... what could cause my battery to turn on me like that? Just a bad battery? Not starting it for 2 months? What could have shorted it out? Is that even possible? What gives -- I've never heard of that before? It's fixed for now, but I want to be aware of a possible cause in order to prevent this from happening again (very scary). Sorry for the novel, but I wanted to relay as much info as possible...
EDIT: The battery was a 3 year old, "no maintenance" battery.
<font color=green>Cheryle</font color=green><P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by shewheeler on 01/15/02 12:24 PM.</FONT></P>
