Welding on Towbar

[Prendo]

I need to get some welding work done on the towbar of my facelift 2016 200 Series. do I need to disconnect the earth from both batteries? Is there a time frame for leaving batteries disconnected? Are there any implications or tricks I should be aware of, when doing this? (I am not doing the welding, but the bloke who is seems to think “she’ll be right”.)

 

[TeCKis300]

I need to get some welding work done on the towbar of my facelift 2016 200 Series. do I need to disconnect the earth from both batteries? Is there a time frame for leaving batteries disconnected? Are there any implications or tricks I should be aware of, when doing this? (I am not doing the welding, but the bloke who is seems to think “she’ll be right”.)

Yes, always a good practice to remove the grounds from the batteries to minimize chances of frying electronics.

Also important to have the welder ground close to the area being worked so current is not trying to move through components.

 

[Prendo]

Thanks for the quick response!

will I need to reset any of the electronics if the batteries are disconnected for, say, more than 15 minutes?

 

[Sandroad]

In N.A. Land Cruisers, if you disconnect the battery, the truck will stall once on the first restart and then run fine on the second restart. The idle will be a bit high to start with but will settle down. On our L.C.s the only electronic reset is the HVAC and maybe some user settings on the dash display; just turn the HVAC back on and enter any of our favorite dash display settings, if needed.

 

[Prendo]

Thanks for the advice.
I disconnected earth on both engine batteries and the aux battery. Welding work completed. Reconnected the batteries and all is well. Initially the rear door would not lift, but sprang back to life once activated from the button in the cabin. All else seems normal, including the radio.

 

[bloc]

In N.A. Land Cruisers, if you disconnect the battery, the truck will stall once on the first restart and then run fine on the second restart. The idle will be a bit high to start with but will settle down. On our L.C.s the only electronic reset is the HVAC and maybe some user settings on the dash display; just turn the HVAC back on and enter any of our favorite dash display settings, if needed.

Don’t forget the backup lines on the nav screen!

One way around the start/stall is to let the ignition stay on for a while before starting. Guessing the ecu needs to do some kind of initialization before letting the engine run.