Hi

Yesterday my sisters 99 caravan stopped working, it acted as if the battery was dead. She had to go some where so I was left to try and figure it out my self. I checked the voltage and it was 12.65V, then I took a hammer and taped on the side of the battery connectors to get them to rotate a little bit, the negative rotated but the positive did not, and it would not start. Then I jumped it from a spare battery and it started right up, I disconnect the jumper cables and turned off the engine and tried starting it again and it started up just fine. I then thought maybe the connectors just need tightening down and the negative connector was the only one that seemed a little loose so I tightened it. So everything seemed to work fine again, I still wanted to know what was going on so I thought maybe it was alternator so I check the voltage with the engine running and I got 14.26V and with the engine off the battery now read 12.85V, was not 100% sure about the reading so I did the old removal of the negative battery cable to see if the engine would stay running on the alternator only but the engine would die and you could here all the relays shutting off the instant the bolt on the connector got loose, I did this a couple of times with the same results, it just seemed odd that in would do that so I tightened it back down and went to Auto-zone and O'Reillys to get it checkered and both said there was nothing wrong.

Later on that night I started wondering if maybe it was the way the negative battery cables are connected to the connector is what is the problem, there is one big wire with a eyelet connector that is held in place with the connector bolt instead of being secured in place like the rest of the negative battery cables are, I am thinking this lone big wire might be connected to something in the TIPM and when the connector bolt gets loose the TIPM looses power and shuts the engine down, so what do you guys think. When my sister gets home I'll take a picture of the connector and post it here.