Little Things

Progress on the truck has been slow. The main goal for the past few weeks has been to get the truck into the garage. The obstacles to meeting this goal have been many, and they've all been little things. Interconnected little things. To get the truck into the garage, the car has to come out. To get the car out of the garage, the no-start condition must be corrected. To fix the starter, it must be trouble-shot. To troubleshoot, the garage needs to be cleaned. It goes on and on.

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The starting problem on the car was annoying and getting worse by the day. A few months ago, the starter wouldn't turn on the first turn of the key. Switch the key on and back a few times and the car would start - not too bad a problem to live with. After a few weeks of that, during a torrential rain storm, the switchy trick stopped working. It took forty minutes of turning the key (no way that I'm doing any repair/diagnostics in a storm when I'm running late to pick up at preschool - just cuss and turn the key-repeatedly) for the starter to spin. In the days following, the starter would take up to ten minutes to decide to turn. Not too inconvenient; just leave for work early and remember to not turn off the engine when picking up at preschool (I don't need thirty little kids watching and waiting for the car to start...).

 

Eventually, I decided that something needed to be done. If I was going to keep driving the car throughout the winter, the starter needed to work regularly. If I was going to park outside (because the truck was in the garage), the weak start needed to improve (it's only going to get colder and harder to crank the engine). I started researching options. A new starter for the Prizm was over $100. The starter solenoid that piggybacks onto the starter is over $100. I thought that the relay might be the problem with the key not working, and the starter might be why it cranked so slowly. This was going to be an expensive fix. I decided to only replace the solenoid and to preheat the engine block with a plug-in block heater (to make it easier for the weak starter to spin the engine).

 

Now, being that I'm cheap - or mainly just not willing to spend money on something that I think isn't worth it - I decided to dig a little deeper. I saw a posting somewhere on the internet about the possibility of rebuilding the contacts on the solenoid for cheap. I thought that might be the way to go, so I started looking for the solenoid on my engine. It's tricky to find. The starter is high on the front of the engine, tucked under the exhaust manifold. It looked like a whole bunch of work to get that thing out of it's home, but I figured that if it saved a lot of cash, I'd be willing to do the work. I set aside some time, and got to digging the solenoid/starter combo out of the engine bay.

 

I managed to twist off 70% of the rusty bolts holding the plastic engine shields under the car. By twisting off, I mean that when I was done, only 30% of the original fasteners were left to secure the panels. That's not a good start. When pulling the panels and reaching to remove the starter, one of the things you run into is the terminal for the positive cable from the battery. It's that thingy below...

 

As I was nursing some wounds and planning the next move, I had the thought to check the battery wire connections. There was a little bit of corrosion on the battery terminals themselves, so I cleaned it off. Under that little flippy cover on the solenoid terminal, there was a wire connection with a lot of corrosion. I scraped that off and made the metal all shiny, then reassembled the starter circuit. To my complete astonishment, the starter worked on the first turn of the key (at full strength/speed, too!). That one little terminal was the reason the car wasn't starting....

 

Sometimes it's the little things that get to you....