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Mr. Underhill:
As the others have already said, the thin wires were smoking because they were carrying too much current from the cranking starter. It draws a lot and needs the big fat ground cable that bolts to the transmission, straight from the battery negative terminal, to carry the return juice. That plainly wasn't doing its job.
So did you have that cable off, by any chance? Or could it be loose? Or, maybe corroded? I wouldn't look for the corrosion at the battery post or clamp, because as you kept it cranking current was flowing from the starter case thru the block back to the battery, not through the big cable to the tranny, but via the skinny grounding wires you saw smoking to the body, and thence via the fat cable from the body back to the battery.
Corrosion at a clamp might mean either no cranking at all or slow cranking but wouldn't lead to overheated skinny ground wires since there'd be no path back to the battery for them either.
As has been pointed out DISCONNECTING one because it was overheating wasn't the thing to do, it just fed even more current thru the few remaining skinny ground wires and risked burning them.
So, look at the big grounding cable to the tranny, and make sure it's bolted up, bolted tight, and clean and free of corrosion.
That's not where corroded cables usually happen. Usually it happens at the positive cable, not the negative, and at the post or eating into the cable's wire strands, back from the battery.
I guess if the battery leaked enough acid you could have corrosion internally in the ground cable strands on the section leading to the tranny, which could be your trouble, but the section leading to the body would have to be sound.
posted by 71.173.76...
, Fri, 6 Nov 2015 15:13:22
, Fri, 6 Nov 2015 21:50:25
, Sat, 7 Nov 2015 13:49:19, Mon, 9 Nov 2015 18:47:11
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