Initial Diagnosis and Disassembly of Old Battery Fixtures

so we're in the shop on day two of this little escapade here and basically my thought process is to clean the battery terminals I'm told that there can be a problem with the ground system in this truck that causes this whole problem so we're just going to clean the battery terminals we're also gonna take a little look I've got smoke coming from under the hood and I don't know why it's coming from under the hood I suspect a valve cover gasket may be the culprit or an exhaust leak of some sort this is a 2000 model Dodge Ram 130,000 miles ish close to 135,000 miles and it's just getting those little quirks as little adjustments those little things that you need to do for these Cummins diesel engines so let's get under the hood here and check things out so this truck has two heavy-duty batteries one on this side and one on that side they're both the terminals are both pretty tight everything's pretty tight it looks like someone has already ran this additional ground wire from the ground here to the body of the truck we're gonna check the other side and see if that's been done also there is some corrosion on here and this could be part of our issue so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the battery terminals off we're gonna scrub these terminals really good and we're gonna install them back on nice and snug and properly first we'll clean them we'll remove them we'll scrub them clean again we'll reinstall and then we'll take the truck for a drive and see if this solves our problem if this doesn't solve our problem we may end up having to put a shift solenoid on this truck in the transmission we'll have to pull the pan and install a shift solenoid on the truck I hope this solves the problem I had this problem a year maybe a year and a half ago something like that and I changed the fluid in the transmission totally eliminated the problem it all went away now I don't know if that was an issue with ground if that was an issue with the fluid what the issue was but it did make the problem go away I suspect someone's done some pulling with truck in the past and that may be why they traded the truck in it just may be due for a transmission overhaul I don't know we'll see so how we're gonna clean these is gonna be a little bit different