Remember the alternator is what pumps the power it is very important that it be grounded well. You may want to try a jumper between the Block and the alternator.

If the car was sitting in my bay I would want to try to get a measurement of the discharge. If you can get some idea of the voltage it would give you a big clue as to where it was coming from. As you know battery voltage is 12 volts, Primary side ignition voltage can reach 100 volts and Secondary voltage trying to find a home can reach 80K volts. Stactic elctricity can yield some high voltages but with everything grounded there should be no static charging things up just power looking for a ground which is why everyone is saying ground.

Something that is grounded correctly will not arc or shock you. If power has a clear straight shot to ground it will not junp into a lighter or you. It will just go home. The lighter and you are full of resistance that big ground cable is not.

Last thing you could check is pull the plug on the alternator and let the car run off the 12.6 volt battery. See if you still have arcing.

 

I've checked all the grounds and they are fine. I even measured the resistance of each ground with a multimeter. I know it seems like it must be a grounding issue but I just don't see that being the problem.

 

Your grounding issue could be internal to the alternator. You could try to run the car with the alternator unhooked. There is not much in a car that can cause static electricity as you described. Sure a failing capacitor can cause a discharge but if it is mounted in a grounded box the static electricity will just go to ground. All static electricity will just go to ground if there is a ground available. A word of warning, the static electricity you are describing is very dangerous to electrical devices, IE your PCM. It may only be 12 volt static but the second you can “see” the arc it can jump to hundreds of volts. If that finds a way to ground thru the PCM it will fry it. Remember the PCM supplies grounds for all the sensors and reads the voltage input.

It is possible for a car to be over charged to the point it becomes just a ball of static but it is very rare and very dangerous to fuel.

 

I've already witnessed the arcing with the alternator completely disababled so it's not that and I've checked and rechecked the engine grounds and the battery side grounds. It's still arcing. I will try some more things tomorrow and post my findings. I agree that it seems like a grounding issue and thats what I thought from the beginning....but I don't see any faulty wiring......YET.... I also read on another forum that the resistance of the grounds should be less than 1 ohm I believe........they all measure up fine on the multimeter.....but I'm not even sure if that is correct.

 

do you get zapped allot when you open the door?

 

I just went out and noticed a few things that seem incorrect......... First, the arcing seems to be coming from the belt itself. I can place a ground wire near the belt and fire will arc to the wire but fire will not arc from the pulleys to the wire....so it seems as if the arc is not traveling from the pulleys to the belt but from the belt into the pulleys..very strange. The only plug wire I see arcing is number one. When I first started the car it idled very high until I unplugged the TPS and plugged it back in...then it idled normally. I also have noticed that if you remove the ground cable from the battery it arcs slightly when hooking it back up. The ignition and all electrical should have been off so doesn't that possibly point to some kind of short in the wiring? It arcs once then stops....after waiting ten seconds or so you can touch the battery cable to the battery and it arcs again....sometimes the radio even comes on while hooking up the battery ground and the ignition is off.........all of the strange problems at once make me wonder if the PCM has shorted or something?....possible?

I've completely removed the little black box under the dash that kills the radio when the doors are closed and the windows.....didn't noticed any difference there either.

The car ran very good this morning for about twenty miles. When leaving my buddy's house it didn't want to start, the starter kinda bucks and stutters and the radio..dash lights flicker in time with the stuttering of the starter like there is a bad connection somewhere.....after about four tries it finally started right up but was running bad and had a considerable loss of power all the way back home. It started crazy like that for a little while once before until I did away with the side post to top post battery cable adapters...they were stripped out and kept having connection issues........I am certain that the new ends I installed are making good connections although the starting problem still happens sometimes.

 

might try a gound wire to the pcm, the bcm has connections to the radio. i wonder if it has something to do with this. theres a thread on fixing bcm in the how to and faq sticky at the top of the 4th gen general section.

 

I don't get zapped opening the doors and I tried grounding the PCM...no change.

 

maybe the belt is generating static power somehow. check to see if any of the pulley's are out of line

 

WOW! Turns out this guy had the same problem in his Jeep and found the solution. sparks around harmonic balancer - JeepForum.com

I never would have guessed what the problem was "To test if this is the case, remove the serpentine belt and start it. If it's still sparking, it's electrical (grounding problem and/or ignition problem). If it stops sparking, your motor is now a makeshift van de graaf generator."