With a title like it is , it will probly help alot of folks down the road. Nice of you Danny for helping the guy out, your a good friend.
That's Danny in a nut shell, he is the kind of guy that will help anyone, he rolled up his sleeves to help me when the coilover shock broke on my coupe, Danny turned into Macgyver by using his belt to and a block of wood between the frame and body to keep the body from rubbing the rear tire. I was able to drive over a hundred miles to get home.
UPDATE:.. starter once again started turning over very slowly or not at all, just clicking. it eventually turned out it wasn't the connections but the battery, it started cranking really slow again and would not start at all...replaced the battery with another one out of another car (same size bat),..and it fired rite up;...put the bad battery in the other car and it would hardly turn the engine over, so even tho the battery shows 12.50 volts on a test, soon as it had a load on it it must short out or ? trying to solve this problem I also put a rebuilt starter on, so now I'll have a new starter and battery soon as I buy another battery,...think that battery was 10+ years old!
Yep, open circuit battery voltage isn't the whole story. Battery voltage under load tells the rest of the story.
Bypass the solinoid and jump straight to the starter, if it cranks over normally it's the solenoid, if not it's the starter. Clean the comutator and put new brushes in the starter to fix it on the cheap or buy a starter.
...I did use a remote starter switch on the starter to see if maybe my ignition switch was faulty,...it still cranked over really slow...all set now I think, ..thanks for the input on this thread, hope it helps someone else.
You need to put a big jumper cable from the batt directly to the post that sticks out of the starter motor not the solenoid. JW
I have seen them smoke believe it or not. Try wrapping the starter with a hammer while he is cranking it. Sometimes when the bushing are bad the armature will lay on the fields and bangin it will jar it loose enough to turn over.
I've used Ford starter solenoids on a few cars; sometimes it's just resistance in the starter circuit, using the Ford solenoid with a buss bar on the GM solenoid ensures that the starter and solenoid get full voltage. Of course, this is a moot point if the battery isn't up to snuff as HRP found.
Put a test light across a conection and try to start if it lights up you have found a problem and don't forget the ground side.
A jump from another good battery can help with a 'no start' diagnosis. If the vehicle fires right up, that points to the battery side of the loop. If the vehicle doesn't crank over better with a jump, that points to the starter/solenoid side of the loop. There are many good tips in this thread but not much was said about trying a jump. It might not get you home but it might at least get you headed that way.
Not always true…a bad battery with a shorted cell can suck the power from the jump-start and confuse the issue…better to by-pass the old battery and attach the jumper cables to the battery cable directly…not connected to the old battery.
In the "starter current draw" part of the manual spec is usually a little blurb stating that the voltage drop between the starter terminal and the + pos battery terminal should not exceed 0.5 volts. You can clean the battery terminals all you want, this is a good thing, but if the crimps and such are corroded internally, the cable is old and crusty and stiff as a roadkill squirrel it will not carry the juice. It's a real quick check, set your voltmeter to lowest scale and place one probe on the + battery terminal itself and the other on the starter terminal. Disable the ignition and crank the engine for a few seconds. The ground or neg side is tested the same way, here it should not exceed 0.2 volts. Ideally voltage drop would be zero but there will always be some. In low voltage high current wiring everything has to be super clean and tight and in good condition or it won't work at all.
I think this was a condition that was referred to as a "surface charge". The voltage may still be there but there's not enough amperage to push any real current thru the circuit. When doing a load test with one of those carbon-pile battery testers as mentioned above, we were always advised to note the battery voltage and quickly put a full load on the battery a couple of times for just a second or two to knock off any surface charge. If the battery voltage didn't recover to nearly where you started, it probably wasn't worth doing the full load test.
Turn the headlights on for 5 minutes to knock off a surface charge, or crank the engine over for several seconds with ignition disabled. Wait at least ten minutes to measure battery voltage, it will "bounce back" over this time period to the true state of charge. Those carbon pile tests are pretty brutal, but they will always expose a battery that is spent. Basically 1/2 the CCAs is applied for 15 seconds, battery voltage should not drop below 9.6 volts at 77° F. A really good battery will stay north of 10.5 or 11 volts the whole time. You can pretty much do the same thing disabling the ignition and measuring the battery voltage while cranking the starter over with a remote button switch. An engine starter won't draw 1/2 the battery CCA - or say 400 amps, but if a fully charged battery drops below 10 volts just cranking the engine over it's time to go shopping for a new one.
...the static battery test showing 12.5 volts threw me, couldn't remember how old the battery was but I put this truck together 11 years ago with a new battery, so I guess I got my use out of a 5 year battery ...having several old cars to take care of doesn't help, but trying to keep better records on em now.
Yeah it's pretty common and throws a lot of people off. Radio works, dash lights ... should be good to go, right? Uh-uh! I'd say you got all the electrons you paid for.
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