Originally Posted by
Shep
God no, nonono no, don't encourage bad behavior, that's like brushing your teeth and leaving the cavities alone, then chowing down on a bowl of popcorn kernals mixed with ice. None of that is even remotely close to a good idea. It's more akin to a band-aid on a broken femur than a legitimate solution to a design flaw.
I don't think anyone at any point in this thread has said that only cleaning up "high resistive joints" alone is a even close to a wise idea for good reason. The first post was about laying down new ground wires to compensate for the undersized OEM ones. Where the notion came from that the car's grounds are properly designed is beyond me but they are anything but.
Steel is tolerable as a wiring path, but only if properly cared for. McFly himself saw exactly why grounding through the easily-rusted frame is a horrible idea. Modern manufacturers do it because unibody designs inherently mean that frame and body are one electrical channel. That's why batteries often ground to the mating section between unibody and frame. And it's also why said ground is physically built far away from potential sources of corrosion, which places it under the hood of the car.
The DeLorean did a lot of things wrong with the electrical approach by design. First, the frame is the only stretch of wire front to back in some ground loops. This is a terrible idea when high current devices (headlights, fans) are using this very same path. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The mere fact that the weakest link needs occasional redoing to keep pristine speaks volumes.
Bear in mind also that automatic frames have a different current capacity than manual frames thanks to the transmission shifter cutout. It's equivalent to a kinked pipe, there's an immediate loss in capacity at that spot. I'd personally estimate that section of frame gives an equivalent AWG size between 1/0 and 2 for copper wiring, given the difference in metal as well as conductivity of copper vs. mild steel, as well as a corrosion factor to accommodate most frame conditions.
This was an area that DMC would have worked out had they been given adequate time and resources to do so. I'm convinced that Johnny Carson's infamous hitchhiking could have been at least partially alleviated with more focus on the electrical system. Some who have crunched the numbers have stated the alternator was more than capable of handling the load, and wondered why it didn't. What's forgotten is the current doesn't travel to the front that well, which is exactly where all the power was being used.