Here's another tip: Your fans and headlights take their ground from the front X-Member framing. That connection might be good, bad, or anywhere in between, but it never hurts to improve your grounding. Plus, if you don't have some supplemental grounding straps, the ERA wiring design has the engine ground to frame as one single 10 gauge wire running from the passenger side cylinder head to the firewall. The ground current will find its way through other connections if you don't have at least one nice ground strap from the engine/transmission to the frame. In this picture, you see that I have a 2 Gauge ground strap running from the driver's side cylinder head to the grounding point on the X-member. Since the X-member is tubular, I use an aluminum saddle washer to make a nice clean connection to it (think back to high school geometry and a line touching a circle, it will only do so on one single point). You can't see that connection in this pic, but you get the idea. If you don't have a grounding strap (or two, or three) from your engine/transmission to your frame, that alone will
decrease the performance of your fans and headlights. If you're curious as to what I do for grounding, I have the battery's negative cable attached to the passenger side cylinder head. The battery is also grounded directly to the frame. I then have a strap that runs from the transmission to the frame, a strap that runs from the intake manifold to the firewall, and a strap that runs from the driver's cylinder head to the X-member frame, which is where the fans and headlights pick up their ground. Before I did that, with the fans and lights on I had 34 amps running through the single little skinny black 10 gauge ground wire running from the cylinder head to the firewall. Now that wire carries less than three amps. Plus, of the 210 amps that my starter is pulling during normal cranking, 60 of those amps are returning to the battery through the battery's ground to the frame (and not through the negative cable). The increase in cranking performance with the upgraded grounding was actually quite remarkable.
