Starter troubleshoot.. tried everything! [Old thread solved]

salad17

Hi all,

No crank no start problem. Starter sometimes clicks once, sometimes rapid fire.

Hooked up to donor car, doesn't work. Tested battery with multimeter, full power.

Tested connection to starter from battery, full power.

Removed starter, connected to jump leads and passed 12V across solenoid and it works fine! Turns and engages. So I figure ok maybe the dirty connection where the key joins the solenoid is to blame, clean it up with sandpaper and contact cleaner and reinstall starter.. Presto! Works fine for 2 days.

Back to square one. I try all previous tests again, no joy. I figure ok, maybe the starter was on the way out and running it outside of the car loosened it up and gave it a couple more days life, but now its done?

Order and install new (spare parts) starter.. No change! Ok so it's not the starter or solenoid and I've just wasted €50. Same tests, connect donor positive directly to starter positive, connect 12v to starter solenoid, does the same as key turn, just clicks.

What am I missing?

Max Moment

Possible bad earth could be your issue. Have a look at the engine earth straps and check for corrosion or breakages

salad17

As in the negative terminal? So using jump leads from neg terminal to ground on the engine body should rule this out?

Max Moment

Yes. If that still does not solve your problem I’d be looking at your ignition barrel

salad17

Max Moment wrote: »

Yes. If that still does not solve your problem I’d be looking at your ignition barrel

But when I supplied power to the terminal on the starter from the ignition barrel it still did not work, does this not rule out ignition barrel? (Doing this with the starter out of the engine ran the starter successfully)

newmember2

salad17 wrote: »

But when I supplied power to the terminal on the starter from the ignition barrel it still did not work, does this not rule out ignition barrel? (Doing this with the starter out of the engine ran the starter successfully)

Read what you wrote again.

salad17

newmember? wrote: »

Read what you wrote again.

I supplied power directly from the battery via jump cables, to the terminal on the starter motor that is normally connected to the ignition barrel

mad-for-tar

Max Moment wrote: »

Possible bad earth could be your issue. Have a look at the engine earth straps and check for corrosion or breakages

+1 on this, may have a ground strap issue in the engine bay somewhere.

Take your jump leads and with everything connected as normal, put the red lead between battery positive and starter terminal 30 (positive terminal). Take the black jump lead and put it between the battery negative and the body of the starter motor or a point as close as possible to the starter motor. This is if space allows you to connect both like this successfully.
Make sure car is out of gear and handbrake on or do next step from a location where it’s safe. Take another piece of wire, hold one end on the battery positive and strike the other end of terminal 50 (solenoid terminal). If starter engages, there’s no issue with the starter.
Try it off the key then, if it works, no issue with supply coming from ignition switch.
Take off the red jump lead between starter and battery, if it still starts, you have an earth problem between battery and chassis / engine / gearbox. If it won’t start at this stage, there’s a problem with the battery positive lead coming from battery to starter motor.
If problem found at this stage, no need to go any further, if not, do the following.
Put the red jump lead back on as previous and remove the black one. If starter engages, it’s a problem with battery positive lead, if it doesn’t, it’s a problem with the negative lead to chassis / engine / gearbox.
Doesn’t really matter which order you remove the jump leads in, you’re either looking for one scenario or the other, if the red jump lead left on fixes it, it’s a problem with the positive cable, if the black jump lead left on fixes it, it’s a ground issue.

Whilst doing this, it’s worth putting multimeter across battery terminals and noting the voltage during cranking, if you find a sudden drop off below 10v, there’s an issue with the battery itself.

Hope it helps.

salad17

mad-for-tar wrote: »

+1 on this, may have a ground strap issue in the engine bay somewhere.

Take your jump leads and with everything connected as normal, put the red lead between battery positive and starter terminal 30 (positive terminal). Take the black jump lead and put it between the battery negative and the body of the starter motor or a point as close as possible to the starter motor. This is if space allows you to connect both like this successfully.
Make sure car is out of gear and handbrake on or do next step from a location where it’s safe. Take another piece of wire, hold one end on the battery positive and strike the other end of terminal 50 (solenoid terminal). If starter engages, there’s no issue with the starter.
Try it off the key then, if it works, no issue with supply coming from ignition switch.
Take off the red jump lead between starter and battery, if it still starts, you have an earth problem between battery and chassis / engine / gearbox. If it won’t start at this stage, there’s a problem with the battery positive lead coming from battery to starter motor.
If problem found at this stage, no need to go any further, if not, do the following.
Put the red jump lead back on as previous and remove the black one. If starter engages, it’s a problem with battery positive lead, if it doesn’t, it’s a problem with the negative lead to chassis / engine / gearbox.
Doesn’t really matter which order you remove the jump leads in, you’re either looking for one scenario or the other, if the red jump lead left on fixes it, it’s a problem with the positive cable, if the black jump lead left on fixes it, it’s a ground issue.

Whilst doing this, it’s worth putting multimeter across battery terminals and noting the voltage during cranking, if you find a sudden drop off below 10v, there’s an issue with the battery itself.

Hope it helps.

Savage thanks, I'm thinking you're both right and most likely the ground cable as I did not connect ground/black cable when testing the starter. So earlier I did just that, ground battery to starter body, turn the key and got.... A new sound! Which actually I think may be good but I may have just drained the battery from working on it and trying to start all day.

Also bought new terminals so will install them and charge battery and try all that tomorrow/Monday.

Thanks for your help!

corks finest

salad17 wrote: »

Hi all,

No crank no start problem. Starter sometimes clicks once, sometimes rapid fire.

Hooked up to donor car, doesn't work. Tested battery with multimeter, full power.

Tested connection to starter from battery, full power.

Removed starter, connected to jump leads and passed 12V across solenoid and it works fine! Turns and engages. So I figure ok maybe the dirty connection where the key joins the solenoid is to blame, clean it up with sandpaper and contact cleaner and reinstall starter.. Presto! Works fine for 2 days.

Back to square one. I try all previous tests again, no joy. I figure ok, maybe the starter was on the way out and running it outside of the car loosened it up and gave it a couple more days life, but now its done?

Order and install new (spare parts) starter.. No change! Ok so it's not the starter or solenoid and I've just wasted €50. Same tests, connect donor positive directly to starter positive, connect 12v to starter solenoid, does the same as key turn, just clicks.

What am I missing?

Missing an autoelectrician

gctest50

salad17 wrote: »

What am I missing?

The "new" one you got could be faulty too

( even a brand new part can be faulty sometimes )

salad17 wrote: »

Order and install new (spare parts) starter.. No change! Ok so it's not the starter or solenoid

Ten Pin

Have you traced power from ignition to the relay? Bypass the relay (double/treble/quadruple check which terminals are which) and see if it works. A faulty relay will work fine one day and nothing the next if the internal contacts are dodgy.

salad17

Ok I have changed the battery terminals and all good now!

The reason it didn't show up when testing is because I didn't think to ground the battery when testing the starter inside the car, assuming that the battery neg connection was already doing this job!

Thanks for the replies..

salad17

Scratch that, it worked perfectly for 4-5 days and then boom back to square one!

Using jump leads again and a running donor car I got it started again.

Disconnected the negative black cable and it started again.

Then something weird happened, I still had the cable from positive donor battery going straight down to positive terminal directly on starter which was working/starting. Took it off donor car and it started again! Took other end off starter positive and it didn't start.

(Also another weird thing happened previously, when I disconnected the positive battery terminal of my car, and pushed it aside, the wire which was now no where near the battery touched the body and generated a spark. How is that possible, there shouldn't be any charge in the circuit? (I'm aware should disconnect neg first but this is to avoid spark/earthing the positive battery terminal))

So anyway after some messing around with jump leads, connecting back to starter, something bad happened and I think the jump cable clamp connected the positive starter terminal to the body, earthing it, creating smoke before I disconnected to find the starter not even producing a click sound any more.

All other electrics still work fine. Wouldn't have thought it was possible to damage the starter in this way?

salad17

This was solved btw, the issue was the connection from the positive terminal to the starter. The reason it wasn't clear when I was testing it is my jump leads were only working intermittently, so when I connected the positive terminal to the starter directly with the jump leads, which should have immediately solved the problem and illuminated the issue, it didn't.

New high quality jump leads purchased!

biko

Thanks for coming back to update