Optima

Marv said:
I guess i have been lucky. , but i never buy the cheap batteries. Marv
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Marv, you haven't been lucky. You have been smart. All of JCI'S batteries go down the same line and are built to order so every shipment is fresh. The key is buying based on performance spec rather than warranty. A battery is a consumible. Generally speaking, the higher the spec the longer the life. This rule does change with use , environment , and the condition of the vehicles electrical system though, so like human life - your results may vary.
 
Like you 4dFord/SC I saw several plant managers get smacked in the arse by the door on their way out. And they all seemed to have the same mind set (the more I save the Company the more they will pay me). That did not help the guy's on the floor trying to meet tighter specs with equipment that was old to start with.
 
Ever ask yourself why the EPA is letting car batteries have any type of lead content what so ever. The answer is safety. Picture if you will an automobile that has been worked on by a guy who used solid copper leads to the battery, all copper rated to not fail under 100 amps. Ever consider the potential explosive force contained within a battery, what sets that force into motion. Heat. If nothing else can fail within the system that the battery is connected to it becomes the final obligation of the battery to negate this potential. Defuse the 2 stick of dynamite bomb with your face in front of it. How does it do that, It melts out those lead posts and destroys itself. It literally says" Bud you are not smart enough today to play with this battery, adios." If a person opens up a battery and sees excessive deterioration of the protective fusible link he may want to reflect upon the life history and duty of this battery, if he is honest with himself he will likely find that the battery was excessively overheated causing a gasification of the terminal fusible compound and successive protective failure of the unit. The manufacturer has decided it is easier to let the battery fail on you than pay you millions of dollars in settlements due to the repositioning of your face. If you move towards a different battery which you wish to also abuse the manufacturer is content with letting you have a negative experience with another manufacturers product. Of course the average guy in his garage is much more intelligent than the metallurgical engineer who designed the specific formulation of the fusible link, twice as smart as the chemical engineer who had teachings in quantum physics differential equations, and applied chemical material sciences, they are also much more genius than the certified electrical engineer who designed the application, and of course the company that made this product is only interested in profit stock proliferation and the bottom line, thats why they engineered a product that can protect you from death , they are just greedy pigs. You should appreciate the fail safe, it may have already saved your butt without you having so much as a clue.
 
This battery was not over heated and the first one that failed wasn't either. There is also no fusible link in these batteries. The failure is from erossion of the of the lead plates in the area of the air vent on the POS side. The NEG side is the same construction and shows no sign of a problem because there is less air in that area. I will be talking to an engineer this week at Optima and get some answers if they will admit the problem but with the nature of the problem in the many failures I have heard of they are all the same, bad connections not getting weak and not taking a charge but a sudden death. G.M.
 
The lead post that you are showing as consumed is a fusible link, any lead connection within the battery is a fusible link, get to the low melting point of lead and presto fusible link. If this was not a concern as to hydrating the combustibles within the confines of the battery case the inner workings of a battery would be of a more noble metal group, a copper or platinum, something more conductive. Even a battery with a screw post on the side will go to an internal fusible lead linkage. The link will deteriorate before the chemical mixture can flash, thus preventing an explosion and protecting the consumer and his property. If a battery were made of all copper or noble internals the battery would detonate, the copper power lines running in the vehicle would cut steel or any thing they might contact. You could quite literally make a cutter out of the live line, however at the max temp of the lead the battery automatically destroys itself. You will also find the air void to be due to a gasification of the battery. There is only really one thing that may cause gasification within a sealed battery, Heat.
 
Frank why don't you build a battery out of a material that don't deteriorate like lead and you will be the richest man in the world. The deterioration of the lead is part of how a battery works. Again there is no fusable link in these batteries that's purpose is to protect the battery. The lead plates that connect to the terminal carries very amps every high amps every time the starter turns. G.M.
 
No, I would not be a rich man, I would be a negligent man, someone would be severely injured.
In the application that todays modern battery is designed for the battery is placed in the coolest part of the engine bay, forward of all exhaust, forward of all radiated heat. In the application of an older vehicle the battery is in an area where it is quite prone to exhaust heat, radiator heat. Internal engine bay temperatures can reach as high as 250 degrees, you will find that the area where an older cars battery is located is among the hottest operating areas within the engine compartment. The action of transferring large amounts of voltage across a metal surface creates heat due to resistance, elevate the environment in which that voltage is transferred and you equate to more heat, hot surfaces equate to more heat resistance, if the battery was operating normally and the act of cranking the engine created a temperature of resistance that were 500 degrees F on a cold start and one drove the vehicle and achieved an engine bay temperature of 250 the same cold cranking procedure would now produce a temperature of 750 F plus the added resistance thermal factor, you may see a temperature in excess of 800 F running across the same terminals, if the combustible temperature of the chemical within the battery is 800, the engineers would formulate a metallic compound that would fail at 775 and you will have melted that metal out, and you have a dead battery. Add to that the fact that this has been a very hot summer and the failures start to add up. In the olden days a gent who lived in Illinois had a battery with a high cold cranking amp rating, this gent would have a tough time with that high CCA battery if he took it to Arizona when it was hot, the high CCA would create too much heat transfer in the hot operating conditions and melt the lead conduit that transferred energy from the mat to the terminals. Any base exposed to an acid that the acid may react upon will generate an electrical field, lead is not particularly magical, they just like it cause the posts will melt off before it explodes.
 
I took a quik look at the older Optima and the newer version this morning. The newer one is 3/8" taller then the older one. This makes 3/8" of more space between the top of the cells and the underside of the lid. They also changed the vent type but is still located near the POS post which failed on both. They also increased the thickness of the lead of the two connecting plates between cells and the plates where the POS and NEG posts are part of from about 3/16" to 1/4" thick the shape remains the same. The POS and Neg posts and the 1/4" thick plate under the cover looks like the lead was cast in a mold with the 8 or 9 lead plate ends in the mold so it is all one hunk with no mechanical connection. The terminal posts, 1/4" lead plate and the lead mass around the plate ends are all one solid chunk of lead. The errosion that caused the failure on both was up near the end of the plate ends where the lead was molded. It wasn't at the joint where the plates were molded but about a 1/4" below on the plates on the new one. The older battery with less air space erroded where they entered along with some of the 3/16" plate that is part of the POS battery terminal. From the guarantee that is now 3 years full replacement with no prorate after that it sounds like they know that in 42 to 48 months they will have a lot of failures and anything beyond that life span is living on borrewed time. As close as I could measure it looks like the plate material in the cells is .025 thick. Erroding from two sides they won't last forever. I"ll still buy another for the Ford but not 6 of them for my motor home as I had intended. G.M.
 
I only use them because you can pound the hell out of them compared to a lead cell battery, they do not like heat, they only last 5 years on average. They stand up better than a lead post to the G forces of racing and if they do get impacted they tend to still start the vehicle and not make a huge mess. I would not use them for the motor home in a linkage situation, I would use lead plates, they will last longer. Try looking at over the road truck batteries.
 
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