Working on a friends 50's GM car and as per the official rules when you remove a battery you should either throw away or just loose the OE hold down hardware. He ordered what is supposedly the official reproduction parts which which match other photos I have seen and seems pretty typical for the era from all the brands. Its basically a stamped metal frame that fits around the top of the battery and had a couple ears for the long bolts to go through. Seems simple enough.
Where the issue comes in is when I install this there is only maybe 1mm-2mm of clearance from the terminals to this frame which is grounded other than perhaps some paint. It doesn't seem like this could be how it was intended. Did the posts on the OE batteries stand a bit higher than modern ones? We are using a nothing special modern battery not any kind of reproduction. Or I I got completely wrong terminals and the OE ones were a very different shape so they didn't come close to this frame?
As far as I can tell Cadillac used the same concept with that top frame and I see some Mopar stuff come up in searches so it really looks like it was common. All I can think of is its got to be the battery post should be higher or the cable clamp should be completely different. Searching those topics in general or for specific models just seem to get too many results and a vast majority of them I know are wrong like when they show the real modern sheet metal terminals, I know that ain't OE for anything over around 25 years old.
Or was this clearance thing a big(ish) problem and that is why people got in the habit of ditching the OE setup the first time they had to change a battery?