Dead Battery; Hood won't open. - 986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners

luci5r · 02-18-2015, 03:43 PM

SOLVED

I'm not an electrical genius, quite the contrary, so I don't fully understand how it worked; why it worked; and what exactly is it that I did, but ultimately I got the hood opened. This is how I did it.

Essentially it was a spaghetti of ideas & trials. 7 or 8 years ago I used to have a PSP for which I had a car charger. The charger plugged into the Cigarette Lighter socket. I went digging for it and fortunately found it! This is a $5 MadCatz car charger for the PSP that I bought off of eBay, which I haven't actually used in over 5 or 6 years probably.

I stripped out the wires; I know the inner/center one is positive and the outer core that wraps around is the negative. So essentially I wrapped the positive wire around the red jumper fuse, and the negative around the latch on the door, and plugged in the Charger into the Cigarette Lighter socket.

Well, nothing happened! Absolutely nothing. Zilch. Messed around with the wiring for a few minutes but nothing.

For whatever reason I decided to break out my battery charger one more time. This is the Schumacher SC-1200A/CA that I bought for charging the battery. The same one that I tried the first time and didn't work; the Charging LED would never come on and as later discovered, it didn't work because it doesn't actually charge unless it's connected to an actual battery.

I decided to hook it up one more time; however, for possibly no other reason but sheer laziness, I didn't remove the PSP Charger - that was still connected - and I plugged in the clamps for the battery charger ON TOP of the PSP Charger connections. For the first time, the "Charging" LED came on. It looked like the Battery Charger was actually charging. The dashboard started to dimly light up as well.

However, the hood still wouldn't pop. Neither from the door panel, nor from the remote Key. I messed around with the clamps, wiring, turned things on & off several times - kept playing with it - even waited like 20 minutes to see if maybe it just needed to charge up a little. Still, no go!

That was a point when I had decided to pretty much give up. I disconnected the PSP Charger wires; re-connected just the Battery Charger - Still no go!!

I was getting ready to wrap everything up and call it a day - when I decided to try one last crazy thing.

I took the positive wire on the PSP Charger; wrapped it around the red jumper fuse; plugged in the charger in the Cigarette Light - but I DID NOT WRAP the negative on the door latch. Then, I connected the Battery Charger on top of it like I had been - Negative Clamp on the door latch and Positive Clamp on the red jumper fuse. Turned it on - hit the hood opener on the door panel - IT POPPED! First Try!

Like I said. I have no idea whatsoever why this worked. With only the positive going from cigarette lighter to the red jumper fuse; negative going nowhere - and my battery charger connecting like its' supposed to.

My uneducated guess is - when the positive wire from the Cigarette Lighter was connected to the red jumper fuse, somehow, IT TRICKED the Battery Charger into believing that it's connected to an actual battery. Somehow completed the circuit - I'm not sure why.

So the major challenge is over. Unfortunately it's too late today to leave the Battery Charger plugged in with the hood open today; so tomorrow Part 2 begins. I didn't close the hood this time; it's just sitting down pretty, not fully latched. Tomorrow I'll connect the Battery Charger to the battery and let it charge for 6 - 7 hours and hopefully it'll give the battery a full charge.

Thanks all for your support / ideas / suggestions and most importantly some of the knowledge & education I gained during this process. I hope my detail helps someone in future.