Its normal for some voltage drop. But that drop should occur over the length of the wiring, for example. You dont want to see a drop across something like a clamp.

Make sure you check the difference between the wire clamp vs the wire itself. Maybe corrosion where the cable end is crimped onto the cable itself??

 

Bad battery was the problem. I had swapped out the battery with a 3.5 yr old one that was working fine in my jeep this summer, therefore I thought the battery wasn't the problem. That turned out to be bad too. One of the cells was froze solid when I brought it into autozone for compuer load testing. UNfortunately I did't do this until pulling battery cables and swapping them and messing around for more time than I'd care to admit. When I put the voltmeter on the battery and had a buddy crank over the engine she would drop down to 5 volts. Also, a month ago when I was bench testing the original starter I pulled out I was dupped because I was testing it with the original bad battery. The terminal to cable crimp connection was bad too.

The cold weather exacerbating the problem makes sense now...

Next time I will be going to Autozone for battery testing sooner than later!!! I think the battery was bad since I bought the car over a year ago.

 

Thanks for telling us the end of the story. Often we never find out if things work out or not.