It won't help you with your tri-star, but I relocated the house battery to
a rear cabinet in my Westy (the one just forward of the water tank). I
found that I never used the stuff in the back of that cabinet anyway, so it
was a good place to mount an Optima (on end, I fabricated hold-downs from
Home Depot aluminum L channel and bolted them to the sidewall of the fridge
cabinet).

This gave me back the under-seat storage behind the driver's seat, and
freed up space for an auxiliary fuse panel in that location. I did all this
last spring (when I had the cabinetry pulled for rust repair anyway). I ran
a pair of 10ga wires from the old location to the new fuse block, and wired
accessories that were on the aux battery into the fuse block. I grounded
the Optima to the frame right near the install location.

The only drawback is that I need to pull the stuff in front of the Optima
out of the cabinet if I want to connect jumper cables to "self jumpstart"
... but I haven't had to do that (yet).

At 08:14 PM 7/7/2005 -0700, David Marshall wrote:
>Tonight I installed a Group 34 Optima battery in my TriStar.  I did as many
>people have done, laid it over on it's side so the terminals point forward
>and then secure the battery clamps.  Has anyone ever started arc-welding
>using this method or have a battery be a projectile in an accident?  With
>the battery on it's side the positive clamp is only a few millimetres away
>from the floor under the seat and there is no way of securing the battery.
>What I did to make me feel half at ease, is use the stock clamp down bar to
>force the battery to the rear of the tray so it can't lift up and used four
>layers of water softening salt bag under the positing terminal so will not
>[hopefully] touch if the Syncro goes on a weird angle or gets into an
>accident... but it can still slide from side to side - if it goes too much
>to the passenger side the positive clamp will touch the factory battery
>retaining bar.  I have inserted a 2x4 and a 1x4 piece of wood on the
>passenger side of the battery to keep it in the driver side of the tray...
>someone please tell me there is a more elegant and safe way of doing this!
>
>David Marshall
>
>Fast Forward Automotive Inc.
>4356 Quesnel-Hixon Road
>Quesnel BC Canada  V2J 6Z3
>
>http://www.fastforward.ca    mailto:sales@fastforward.ca
>Phone: (250) 992 7775        FAX: (250) 992 1160
>
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