Thanks Evi3 for taking the trouble to post the photos. I'll check out the date code - also need to get familiar with data reported by new BM2 monitor. I didn't suspect there was any problem with the battery coming into this, just wanted to be prepared for the inevitable.Mine have always pivoted slightly with some effort. Never been an issue yet.
Not sure what this "horn" is you refer to.
If you want to check to see if the battery is Original to the car, see this pic on what to look for:
If the 4-digit stamp is not there, it is a replacement battery and there will be a round date sticker someplace else.
If the 4-digit stamp IS there, you need to get rid of that battery ASAP
In your photo, the terminal nuts are hex (10mm nut as I think you mentioned in a previous post) as are mine - though mine are on a 45-degree slant, with the slice through the lug occurring along a diagonal/helix, not like any old-school lug I've ever seen (see photo below). In the next post, Simoni3 mentions he's "lost a couple of torx bits" in the process of swapping out batteries, so is it an attractive option to unscrew from the center of the lugs instead, where there is indeed a Torx bolt? I'm wondering now if the pivoting I'm feeling is around the Torx bolt, as Alohart suggested - seems likely, really.
Do the brass bits come with OEM battery? Looking online at the range of replacements, it looks like those boys need to get together and come to some kind of agreement to standardize their lugs - they're all over the map: flat with hole, tapered, side-tap and top-tap without anything removable, etc.
The brass "horn" I mentioned is circled in the photo. You might also be able to inadvertently see something about the battery genesis - I took this terrible shot not for that, but to see what the h was going on where I couldn't see, to possibly explain why my lug remained a little pivot-y.
I took it off again after this shot, also because I didn't like the BM2 spade terminal potentially wandering out of the battery terminal's nut reach (as seen in photo), and moved it to the back side where it would be beneath another (ring) terminal - but didn't find any improvement in the wiggle-ability of the lug.
With traditional battery lugs, if you didn't pay a little attention to getting them fully seated on the tapered posts before tightening, you could run out of thread before they were really snug (or the lead would just mash up from overtightening, so further tightening would only compound the problem). I'm pretty sure mine was seated before tightening, but it's a terrible place to try to see anything while my hands can't even find room to get in there. Honestly I didn't even see the Torx fasteners while working on this.
