[srobertson88]

Hi everyone, first time here, appreciate you guys in advance for any assistance. I know very little and sort of winged it through the first couple of issues but should probably stop and get some advice before I blow this thing and myself up!

Late 80's EZGO 36V purchased 1 month ago. Was running fine. A week ago I was driving it, again running fine power seemed fluid, then parked for maybe 3 hours. Key was off, very light rain throughout the day. When I got back on, it went maybe 6 inches and stopped. Seems as though the batteries were dead and thus the charger would not firee.

I purchased a battery tester and it reported they were all bad. Figured that to be BS so kept digging. I opened the batterys and found the water was very low so I topped all the chambers off short of about 3/4" from the top.

OK need to pause here and point out that, prior to adding water, I had been doing all kinds of stupid stuff trying to get power into these things. I tried using a 12V charger to charge 2 batteries in a series. Didn't seem to work. I hooked up a 1A charger and later a 3A charger (both for 6V) to individual batteries and to the circuit and they would not fire. So I used one of those jump starter devices, about the size of 2 IPhones stacked upon eachother, that is supposed to be able to jump a car 25+ times. When I used this, the 1A and 3A chargers would kick on. I let them run for over a day and when I tested the batteries it still indiciated 0% or BAD. Also, at one point, when I was jumping a battery using this device, it pulled almost 80% of the fully charged device power out of it within maybe 10 seconds.

My point is that I probably hooked these variety of options up in the wrong way. I got smoke twice. I know, I'm an idiot and that was dangerous but nothing blew up and eventually, it seems after adding water and then using the jumper, the golf cart charger kicked on. I let it charge overnight and the next morning (today) it drives with plenty of power.

Problem is..

It seems to accelerate on it's own. Key must be switched to ON. As soon as I flip it to Forward or Reverse, without touching the pedal, it goes.

Within 1 minute, there was smoke coming from under the seat. Even with it stopped it seemed to persist. Removing the key (possibly just turning the key to OFF, not sure) made it stop.

+ There is a metal coil that was red hot. Inside the little metal box thing between the battery pack.

Not sure what's wrong. Please don't forget that the batteries seem to die the very first time and go to zero even though I had been using it day-to-day. That could have been a shortage of water, or maybe something shorted out, and is resulting in these new symptoms as well?

Any ideas on where to start?