but i just think its a story that about sums up owning a (project) thridgen , anyway many many months ago when it was still freezing in ohio my heater core started smoking and spilling antifreeze, so just a week ago i replaced it, and while i did i took the whole dash out, cleaned up all the panels and vents got a new black dashpad, with no cracks it just needed cleaned, and all that black checkered kinda trim, i put carbon fibre tape over it, and it looks a thousand times better i think, i made my own gauge templates in photoshop and put them on, and i replaced the cracked plastic that goes over them, anyway the reason i put this in electronics is because after working on it for about 4 days, i took it for a test drive to see that everything was working fine and all still alright, it was, i had a great drive on a country road out in the middle of almost nowhere (i love driving that road) and it was just a great moment, until the car shut off and all the electronics were no longer working, this was a real duh, the battery was dead, but the reason behind it is whats funny, my father whom first provided me the car by purchasing it for me a year ago, had taken my battery and put it in his malfunctioning 99 tahoe, mind you my battery is already to small for that truck, and ran it down to about 9 volts, which apparently will start my firebird fine, but not keep it running, and what he said to me was even funnier, ahem "well if you wouldn't go pluggin **** in and unpluggin it behind the dash your battery wouldn't be dead" well this made me fairly unhappy, quite so much that i yelled back at him "maybe if you didnt drain my **** battery the car would have run fine today" (mind you it shutoff about 4 times from there to home, i had to find four people to jump me, thankfully its a small town and everyone kinda knows everyone, and i am well liked, so yes the car is sitting at home, my eventual question (you knew it was coming) can a "battery tender" recharge it completely up to the 13 volts it had before, or do i just need to get another battery???

thanx for listening to me bitch and helping me if you decide to

 

Sounds more like a charging system problem.

 

Yeah - once it's started and running, as long as the alternator is charging, battery should not matter should it? I mean can't you still take the battery out of the equation literally on these cars after it's started?

I'd look at getting a full real charge on the battery (parts store will do it for free), then get the alternator tested.

 

No, you still need it to power the alternator field winding.

 

thanks for all the help guys, i hope that autozone can charge my battery, its was a good battery its a die hard, and i think the alternator may be bad in it, because it didn't charge it at all, i let it run for almost 20 minutes and nothing