Bad ground can cause many things. When my bro was chopping up his crewcab, he had forgotten to ground the FP properly. It never fired the truck. When I was listening to the motor, I heard no fuel. After a few argument, they had to re-adj the ground for the FP. Whirl and fired away, presto, a start.

If you don't trust the battery w/ a volt meter, try the battery on another car and fire it up.

BTW: a dead battery won't hold a charge properly. On my past 240, I had a severe bad alternator which I didn't know. It kept draining my battery to death.

The worst case scenario which happened to a friend w/ Haltech. He somehow had an electrical surge that wiped out his whole setting to fire up his car. Completely Wiped out his settings. Yes, he ran the car for a few times. shut it down for the night. By morning, it never fired again and gave up on the project that he had worked on for over 3.5 yrs or so.

 

I tried the stock ECU too. Still not a lick of power. I've already had one EEPROM on my EMS fry, I don't know how thrilled AEM would be about overnighting me another.

EDIT: BTW, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has thrown in their own insights. I really appreciate the help.

 

To test if that wire is shorted to ground, see if there is a small or non-existant resistance between that wire and a ground point. Every point of ground on your car is connected. That wire, if it's supposed to be 12V, shouldn't be touching ground anywhere. If it is, you'll get continuity between it and ground, which is essentially a fancy word for reasonable resistance. Two wires that aren't connected are open, and as such have infinite resistance. If there's a short, you'll get something closer to almost no resistance.

As for trusting the battery, it's possible it's the problem, especially if you've had a slow leak over the last week. You just hooked this all up a week ago and maybe there is a short somewhere that drained it. It would still be ~12V because it could never be completely drained, but it may still be out of juice.

Batteries don't "push" current as someone said before, but the circuit draws current from them and if they don't have enough stored energy, the voltage will drop when a load is placed on them. So if you try starting the car and the voltage drops to nothing, then it's drained. Consider this: you could get 8 AA batteries adn line them up in series. That's just like having a big 12V battery. But starting a car requires 300-500 amps of current and when 12V is attached to the starter, that's what it's going to draw from the battery. If you use the string of 8 AA batteries to start the car, the won't be able to sustain that much current and they will show no voltage as long as that load is placed on them... and I'm guessing the starter won't even start to turn...
-N

 

First thing I'm gonna try is to jump the car when I get home, and if that doesn't work I'll start the wire tracing method. Thanks, folks.

 

basically for coninuity you set the multimeter to read ohms, i think for cars its 200, i always forget. but in short, it will display 1 and if the line is connected then it will read 0. how many actual wires are we talking about? did you use a strong enough gage wire to go from the trunk to the engine bay for your battery?

ps i think its hilarious how everyone keeps telling you to jump the car if you already tried, lol! i doubt its your battery.

 

0 gauge from battery to trunk. I doubt it's the battery too, but I'm willing to give it one more shot. It doesn't make sense why 2 of the 3 wires connected to the battery's power have 12v current and one has nothing. The power fading didn't make sense to me either. I dunno. If anything I'm guessing it's a short at this point. Guess I'll find out one way or another.

 

That's a little multi-meter specific. To do continuity testing, you just measure resistance. Infinite resistance is an open connection or no connection. A 0 resistance, or close to it, indicates a connection. There's no exact numbers here, but that's the gist. I only ever use an analog meter, so I just watch the needle move to find this stuff, but a digital meter will just show you a small number for resistance if that dead wire is shorted to ground (when measuring between ground and that wire).
-N

 

i think you will find out the hard way. it has to be a short somewhere, a no ground is possible somewhere but its almost like its "semi" grounded like its getting some juice but not all of it. sounds like something you'll kick yourself over.

thanks for the info neil. yea i forgot about the analongs, sorry lol.

 

No problem... it's funny, you know... my wife is an electrical engineer with a nice big electronics kit and a nice digital meter that does everything except inductive current readings (the ones that read the current of a wire wirelessly when you wrap the arms around the wire). Yet, I go out and play with things with my cheapo RadShack $10 analog meter ;-)

It's like having a tach that just shows a number instead of a needle approaching redline... which is more fun to you?
-N

 

My multimeter is a crappy digital Radio Shack one, but it suited my needs. Now I'm in no position to be buying anything, so I doubt I'm gonna be upgrading that anytime soon.

 

OL on all the wires that carried voltage. 3.5 on the one that doesn't. I've started the wire trail at the fuse box. What scares me is that I think this is the main 12v ignition wire as well.

 

i'v used the lancer fuse box very rarely, is there an ignition relay in there? try starting from there, i know this sound stupid but have you tried to jump the relays? basically have 2 wires, ground and hot, connect to a 12v source (your battery or i always use the cigarette lighter and an old cell phone charger i dont need anymore and split the wires out of it) and test relays for continuity, then put a wire to each relay point, it should click

 

Did that resistence check help diagnose the problem at all? I'm trying to find anywhere the wire could possibly be grounded or shorted, but, like I said before, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

 

I was checking other known 12v sources just because I really have no idea what I'm trying to nail down. Got higher resistance readings (85-90 range) from near the ECU to ground points on the center console (my front interior is pretty much all in the back seat so everything's exposed). Compared it with ground point on the ECU to ground point by the console and that was like 0.01-0.02. The lowest readings seem to be in the engine compartment. So does that mean the short/ground is closer to the engine compartment? I appreciate the explainations everyone's given so far, but I'm an electard, so if it can be broken down any further I'd appreciate it.

 

I'm not exactly following you. Are you saying that you tested a hot lead with the actual groudn wire, and then tested the hot lead and just used a local groundpoint (such as some metal nearby)?? And that when you test the actual grounds theres little to no resistance?

If you could check continuity it would tell you, you test a ground wire and theres no change, then no connection. And same with the hot. You meter is a digital so it SHOULD have it, can you snap a pic of it and maybe I can tell you what setting to use.