I figured it was probably time to replace the battery after taking it off the tender, (its been idle for the last 3 months), and getting the car warmed up for an oil change. I got the oil and belt changed, parked the car again and hooked up the tender... it showed the battery at 70%. I searched quite a bit here, to find that many people have had problems with electrics and cycling the top after changing the battery and wasnt able to come to a conclusion as to why. I figured I would simply nip that in the bud and hooked up my jumper cables from my truck to the pos lug and engine mount on the cooper while changing the battery out. Everything went fine and the electrics and top work perfectly. I went with an AC Delco 47-PG battery with 650CCA, it fits perfectly.
The old battery was dated April of 2011, so I figure its had 2 batteries in 14 years. I can live with that average looking forward.
So... did I just not find any threads of people using jumpers to keep conductivity (especially easy to do on the S), or is this method generally not used?

 

Personally, I think the risk of a short exceeds the value of saving the radio presets.

 

Not quite sure how I would be risking a short.

 

Nope...disconnected the OEM battery, pulled it out, set it on the ground.
Installed a new Optima red top, connected the cables, closed the hatch.

Reset the radio and clock, went on my way.

Mike

 

There's a memory cable that you can buy to plug into the OBD II connection port under the dash that you can hook up to another 12v external power source if you want to save all your radio and clock presets if you want. It also saves all the ECM computer data so the ECM doesn't have to go through all the relearning from your driving.

If you use this memory cable, you just have to be careful and not let the "+" battery cable touch ground anywhere when changing the battery

I used mine all the time when I was working for a company.....we had to be careful, a lot of cars, especially Honda's have to have the factory radios unlocked with a code if battery is disconnected without using the OBD II cable

Bryan