Best Muscle Cars
Muscle Car Battery Maintenance: 5 Helpful Tips
It is very important to maintain your muscle car battery. This guide on muscle car battery maintenance lists 5 helpful tips you need to know.
If you’re lucky enough to own a Ford Mustang, a Chevrolet Camaro, or one of the other types of muscle cars, you know all about how much horsepower it’s able to produce. But you also know that, without a fully functioning battery, it’s not going to deliver the kind of power that you’re looking for.
With this in mind, it’s very important for you to perform muscle car battery maintenance on a regular basis. By maintaining a car battery over time, you can make it last a whole lot longer and prevent it from dying on you without warning when you’re trying to show off what your muscle car can do.
Need a hand maintaining your muscle car battery? Check out five helpful tips below that will keep batteries for muscle cars humming along nicely.
- Do a Basic Inspection of Your Muscle Car Battery Every So Often
You probably spend a ton of time with the hood for your muscle car propped open. Muscle car owners are known to spend their fair share of time poking around underneath their hoods and trying to get more performance out of their vehicles.
Every time that you pop the hood for your muscle car open, you should perform a basic inspection of your muscle car battery. Look for any signs of leaking acid and check to see if there is anything else you might need to be worried about.
There are all kinds of obvious problems that you may experience with a car battery when you own a muscle car. Learn more here about one problem that may present itself at some point.
- Clean Any Corrosion Off Your Muscle Car Battery Cables and Terminals
No matter how diligent you might be about doing muscle car battery maintenance, it’s almost impossible for vehicle owners to avoid corrosion when it comes to their batteries. Every time you drive your car, a little bit of hydrogen gas from the acid in your battery will be released, and it’ll cause corrosion to form.
More often than not, you’ll find this corrosion built up around your muscle car battery cables as well as the terminals on your battery itself. You can clean it away by creating a concoction consisting of baking soda and water and using it right on the corrosion.
You should get into the habit of doing this at least once every few months to stop corrosion from having its way with your battery. Too much corrosion is going to result in big problems if you’re not careful.
- Take a Look at How Much of a Charge a Muscle Car Battery Has
When you pull your muscle car out of your garage and start driving it down the street, you want the battery in it to be fully charged. If it’s not, you might not get the kind of performance you would expect from it.
Fortunately, it’s simple enough to see whether or not your battery is charged during your muscle car battery maintenance routine. All you’ll need is a handy-dandy hydrometer to do it.
To use a hydrometer to test your battery, follow these steps:
- Squeeze the ball on your hydrometer and use it to draw the electrolyte solution from one of your battery’s cells
- Write down the reading you receive from your hydrometer
- Squirt the electrolyte solution back into the battery cell that you took it from
- Repeat this process for each cell in your muscle car battery
If you have a muscle car battery that is fully charged, all of the hydrometer readings that you get should be right around 1.265. If the readings are lower than that, it might be time to charge your battery or it might be time to replace it with a new one.
- Avoid Doing Things That Could Result in a Low Battery
In addition to testing your muscle car battery to see how much of a charge it has, you should also work to prevent the charge from dipping at any point. There are lots of different things that you can do every day to stop your car battery’s charge from taking a nosedive.
You can, first and foremost, avoid taking short tips while driving in your car. It’s not good for your car battery when you start your car, drive it a few blocks, park it, and then turn it off. It’s not going to give your battery the time it needs to charge itself.
You can also keep your battery fresh at all times by steering clear of turning on too many accessories inside your car at once. If you’re constantly charging your phone and tinkering around with your interior lights, this can take a toll on your battery over time.
- Know When It’s Time to Replace Your Battery Altogether
By making sure that you do enough muscle car battery maintenance, you can guarantee that your battery will stick around longer. But no amount of maintenance is going to make it run forever.
Most batteries for muscle cars as well as batteries for classic cars and regular cars are only going to last you about five years before needing to be replaced. You should be prepared to replace them with new ones once they reach that point.
Always try to go with higher-quality car batteries, especially for muscle cars. They’ll help you avoid having to replace them sooner than expected.
Put Muscle Car Battery Maintenance at the Top of Your To-Do List
If you own a muscle car, spending a lot of time doing car battery maintenance might not always be what you want to do. But it’s what you need to do if you want to get the most life out of your battery.
Push muscle car battery maintenance higher up on your to-do list and use the tips found here when maintaining a car battery. They’ll yield the best results and ensure your battery sticks around for a long time.
Want to get your hands on more tips and tricks for taking care of your car? Browse through the articles on our blog to find them.
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