I have two problems here and im almost sure now that they are directly related. These are: a battery problem and a starting problem. Starting out, when connecting the battery terminals, there was a flurry of sparks and other than that, I could turn the car over till I was blue in the face but it would not start and sometimes, there would be a spark and some smoke from the positive terminal of the battery- obviously I immediately stopped at this point. I traced where the wires from the battery ran. I ended up disconnection all the fuses and still no result, then disconnected the B+ terminal of the regulator. Bingo, no more sparks when connecting the battery, so I reconnected the fuses. I tried to turn it over and the large spark from the battery terminal showed up and when that happens, there is a click but the engine doesn’t turn over. The battery terminals are not tight- I can remove them by hand, but they are not that loose. So, am I looking at a problem with the starter? Distributor? I got out my handy DMM and looked around but I really don’t know what I am looking for. I also posted the recent, “Chronic dead battery.” Before the recent freeze, none of this happened. I tried to start by jumpstart and couldn’t get it started- just turned over and no more. I checked under the distributor cap for…something…a blind guess really and got no where and replaced the cap the way it was. One time when jump starting, there was a little smoke from some wiring near the front right headlight in that bunch of wires- I disconnected all of them and checked the ground wires there that run to the dynamo- an ohm reading of 0 when looking at the other two wires and ground bolt. I haven’t seen the smoke since. Then I got the battery charged at Autozone and all the above started.
Any help, or a point in the right direction would be wonderful. Thank you. Dave.