Hello Ted:

I am not sure if I understand what you are describing, but I THINK you were hearing the "click-click-click" of a bad battery connection. Remove the two clamps from the battery terminals, apply a liberal amount of elbow grease to all of the contact surfaces with steel wool, apply a very light coat of dialectric grease to all contact surfaces and re-attach, tightly. Make sure that the ground strap which runs from the battery's negative terminal to the engine compartment bulkhead is in good shape, too. You might want to disconnect the end that attaches to the bulkhead and perform the same procedure. You may find after all that that you just had a bad connection. I hope so, as this particular solution is simple and cheap.

Cheers,

Jeff Pucillo