Power Steering Hose Grounding Out?

Son of a bitch I am frustrated. New starter is in. Everything appears to be grounded properly. Battery reads 12.6 volts between the poles. Positive power cable AT the starter reads 12.6 volts.

Get in the truck, turn the key, click click click click repeatedly. What the heck am I missing?

I push started the truck to make sure that momentary insanity of charging the entire engine didn't destroy anything - it didn't. The truck starts fine that way.

The only thing I can think of is that when the positive terminal is disconnected from the battery and I touch the neg on my voltmeter to the positive pole and the positive on my voltmeter to the positive (disconnected) battery clamp I get a reading of -12.3 volts. Does this mean I still have a short somewhere? Ugh

EDIT: I also bypassed everything and ran a 16 gauge wire from the solenoid switch directly to the positive battery terminal. Still just clicks.

Could it be my battery doesn't have enough amps? It's slightly smaller than the one that was in the truck before.

 

Holy cow. Figured it out finally. I had a ground wire on the firewall I had not yet connected since the rebuild. My guess is that it had been laying on the valve cover and connecting but it finally fell off and behind the engine. I connected this again and it started immediately. What a pain in the ass for nothing. Haha. Thanks again for your help. I will be replacing all of my ground wires.

 

Yep you get an I told you so. But I didn't realize I was missing an extra ground.