Batboard

I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion. I bought some vehicular chargers. The cable says 12volt. I hooked the black up to - and the white to +. The charger began smoking! I thought it was the cable, so I tried another charger with another cable. Still smoked. I looked at a neighboring fire dept's hookup. They had their's hooked up the same. I went back and wired to the battery. Still smoked the charger. The vehicle is a 2000 Ford. I have other Motorola mobiles hooked up the same way (via the same power sources) and there has never been any problems.

Any suggestions?

One could assume the charger is defective!
You had it wired properly the first time.

Well, I thought the cord was defective, so I tried another cord and another charger and the same thing happened. It crossed my mind that maybe the used chargers were defective, but I figured more than one being defective was strange.

Where did you get the chargers? If you bought them together at a cheap price, it's possible that you bought several bad ones that somebody wanted to dump.

Well, that's what I thought may have happened, but the thing is the chargers seemed to work for a few seconds, then smoked, then nothing. I am strongly leaning toward your opinion.

Just a thought: are they factory or did some electrician make them? House wiring is Black = HOT (+), white = NEUTRAL (-). Maybe you have reverse polarity and the protection diode has shorted.

I thought that could be the case, but the cables are Motorola cables. The fuse didn't even blow in the unit, even though it was a properly rated fuse.

an old British car story.....

Electrical devices run on smoke. Wires carry smoke to each device. A lightbulb only uses a little bit of smoke, so the wire leading to it is small. A starter motor uses tons of smoke and that's why the wire is so big leading to it. As long as each device gets a good supply of smoke, it works just fine. The problem is, if some part of the system breaks, it lets the smoke escape and the devices in the circuit no longer work because all of the smoke going to the components is escaping to the atmosphere- and THAT is the peculiar smell we're all familiar with.

(I know.....nobody like a smartass!)

That's ok. After the headache I got trying to figure this out I could use a good laugh!

The first two rules of electrical engineering:

1) Given enough current, any component is a fuse.

2) The most expensive compenent in a device will always fail, in order to protect a ten cent fuse.




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HumHead on 2002-01-23 16:19 ]</font>