ot/ positive ground on neighbors car, wtf?? Options

[jsayre914]

My neighbor has a 65 austin healey, sitting in the garage for years, he sees me working on the teener every day. today he comes over and asked if i could help him change the battery in the car because it would not start. (he is older, no real tools) so i ask him if he checked the voltage first, he said no. I had 12.7 volts good. turn the key and the volts drop to 1. so i hook up a jumper box and turn the key, i hear the starter spinning but not enguaging. I am not an expert in any way, so i figure its either the starter or the solinoid.

how do i figure it out??

and the best part is the positive lead on the battery goes to ground and the negative lead goes to the solinoid wich is about 6 inches away from the starter. all my meter readings were done with the red wire touching the body and the negative touching the solinoid.

i cannot figure out how to think backwards. If i want to test the starter, the bolt is negative and the body of it is +

i really want to help the guy out, but i dont know how. If it were me i would already be ordering a starter.

what is the next step??

thanks


p.s. who the @#$#$ thought up the idea of reversing the ground, what benefit could that possibly have??

[Katmanken]

Tata is the large Indian engineering and manufacturing company that they send your job to.

Had to work with those idiots. Company ordered us to stop using the US FEA engineers, and send the work to Tata. Frickin work was wrong time after time after time after time. Can you say fired US Engineers because the US Engineers were held responsible when the Tata PHD's couldn't do the work- no matter how many times you explain it to them????

Ca you say cost over-runs of 1300%

Remember the fasteners that broke on the Boeing Dreamliner wing test?

You know, the brackets that hold the wings on and took out some wing stringer too?

That's another Tata sucess story

Hmmm. Maybe they will keep the positive ground on the cars. Why not, they do everything else wrong.