Hey. New here. Original owner on truck. 165K miles. 4 door, full sized bed. Love it. Wished I had gotten 4X4, but otherwise has been a great and reliable truck. Never left stranded til now. Here is issue. Drove it, parked, went in 10 minutes, came out, goto start, heard one click and it went dead. No lights, interior or exterior. Nothing. Jump start didnt work. Checked battery even though it is less than a year. Was perfect. replaced connectors, spliced +battery cables back 4-6" to ensure no corrosion in battery cables. Replaced starter (solenoid is attached to starter). Replaced relay. Replaced ignition switch. Nothing has changed outcome. If I remove the negative cable from battery and put back, lights come back. As soon as I try to turn ignition to start, one click and all lights go out. I am stumped at this point. Btw, I don't have a chip key and the keyless remote hasn't worked for over a year (the fob fell into salt water) so I have just used the key to unlock doors. There was no issues, hard starts, or anything prior to this to give any indication that a problem was near. Literally was totally fine, then this... I am about to tow to Ford dealership since I am at the end of what I can figure out. Thanks for any guidance.

 

Welcome to the site..

Generally a full dropout like that is somehow related to power distribution, or grounding. Grounds were checked, clean, tight? Battery voltage remains spec, tested at the source on and at the time of an event? Jump/assist has no change?

 

You are talking to a component monkey here (brakes, starters, alternators, etc). so you will have to talk more slowly and dumb it down for me!! The ground on the battery was good and clean. Just the positive side looked a cruddy. When the battery was tested, it came out "perfect" from what the bench test stated. I don't know about testing at source at time of event or jump/assist. I know the wrecker guy put his jump box on it and it didn't do anything. He felt it was the little corrosion on the positive side cable that was the break. Hence the splicing back on that side. What other grounds can I check other than point at battery?

 

Update: I went back and pulled apart the negative battery cable. I cut and stripped it back further and cleaned the copper wire even more. I put the connector (from advance auto) back on and it got enough contact to turn over finally! I had already had this done when I put in a new battery so just figured the wire on that side was good. I am going to go to NAPA and get a better connector (no disrespect to Advance) and splice back further til I hit completely clean wire all the way through. I can't believe this little oversight caused so much second guessing. Was one of the of 1st things I updated several months ago to avoid this issue to begin with. sigh. Well, she is back on the road and peace has been restored to the universe. Thanks for the input hayapower!

 

Glad it was a simple fix..