Hi guys,
I was reading past posts regarding battery-ground-to-passenger-fender. My car does not have this. Everything seems to work fine on my car, gauges, lights, stereo, hvac, etc. The negative cable goes directly to the alternator mounting bracket. There IS a smaller wire split off at the battery clamp end, but it is not connected to anything.
(I do have the 3 braided ground straps connected...1 at each valve cover to firewall and one from the subframe to body.)
Should I even mess with it? (You know, if it aint broke don't fix it)
If I decide to hook it up, where does it go? Anyone have pics?

Thanks.

The correct ground is from the neg batt to the fender. The ground straps are part of RPO U63 for noise suppresion. Check your AIM...

You will hear many say thay added the braided straps and solved problems. All that means is they went around the problem instead of fixing it!!

Actually the car will work without it but it does have a purpose. Right now your car has a single connection to the engine block. If that comes loose everything in the car shuts down. With the connection to the inner fender you would still have lights and emergency flashers.
Technically it's called single point grounding but the above reason makes better sense.

OK...and it goes from the negatve cable to....?

There should be a threaded hole on the passanger fender reinforcement a few inches from the battery toward the firewall. Therre should be a lug on the end of the wire from the neg terminal. Use a star washer between the lug and painted surface to insure proper grounding...

The ground to the fender is an attempt to keep noisy things from interfering with other circuits like guages and radios. The headlights draw their current through the front assembly via the fender ground. The alternator and ignition are in a separate circuit via the direct connection to the block. If you omit the fender ground you may get things to work properly because the headlights, radio, guages, etc will find a ground path through the engine block. But you can probably improve the brightness of the head lamps and keep some static out of the radio with the fender ground.

Grounding insn't a perfect science. Ideally every circuit would have a dedicated ground at the negative post of the battery. In reality, engineers tried to isolate the engine noise (alt and ign) to the block and bypass everything else around it. DjD is right in that usually that means they kept fiddling with bonding straps and other tricks until everything worked as expected. Call it black magic or voodoo if you like. But of all the grounds and bonding straps, the fender ground is an important one.

-dnult

Thanks guys, I'll give it a try! How big does this wire have to be? I have the big cable going to ground as stated before and a smaller wire that has a connector on it that goes nowhere. Would that be sufficient to ground at the fender?

Any gauge would work, 10-14 is fine I guess, go as big as 8 if you want. Basically the ground should be as big as the positive for whichever item is using power at the time and needs to ground thru that connection. Since the starter would ground thru the larger ground, it does not need to be as large. Mine is 12 I believe and I will be upgrading it to 8 gauge.

The pigtail that is hanging free out of your neg cable post lug should be all you need Steve. You refered to it in your first post. Get the right size ring-lug, crimp it on the end and bolt it up to the fender reinforcement...

And if you have a soldering gun... solder it!

Thanks guys, will do!