bama-six-gun said:
budro, you can't even see it that well to tell what i even did.
it is hooked up just fine for what i was doin.
the ground is on the black, and the red is on the power side.
all the zip ties were just to keep it from moving around.
SO
I understand it was temporary.
Just the same we could have been reading headlines of a redneck in Alabama how died by wiring 120V lights to his truck. Not likely but possible, and then I would have one less person to pick on
Your batteries and battery cable until the reach the fuse block are UNFUSED circuits. If something goes wrong there, that equals fire. I would never
drive a vehicle that had alligator clips connected to the batteries, especially that large and with that amount of exposed copper.
The Christmas lights are a two wire setup, understandable as that's all you'll find for sale. The problem is that on a two wire setup when there is a fault ( to ground or to the trucks frame by the ungrounded [hot] wire ) then there is a potentially deadly consequence. In a normal ground fault with a three wire circuit the amount energy (amps drawn) is not measurable, this energy travels back through the grounding wire [ground] to the panel and trips the over current protection [breaker]. When you have a two wire system and the fault flows through a person ( metal case tool that shorts, pickup truck with chaffed wiring touching the metal body/frame) then the person becomes the path to ground. Your average person is roughly 26 ohms resistance to ground. A little math and that's four amps. Four amps is not enough to trip the over current protection so the person dies. It only takes one quarter of one amp to stop the heart. So since you don't have the option of a three wire system you should use a GFCI. They sell GFCI pigtails [cords] that you can plug in. A GFCI reads the amperage on the ungrounded wire [hot] and the grounded wire [neutral]. When the amperage coming back from the grounded wire is less than that of the ungrounded wire and getting close to a dangerous level the GFCI trips, within milliseconds.
Like I said it's not likely that anything would have happened, but I would cut off the alligator clips, and installed on of these: