Re: Clicking Noise When Car Won't Start

HEAT is another causal factor in having a starter seemingly fail
sporadically. The typical situation is the vehicle has been driven at speed
for sustained time. You exit the off-ramp and immediately park the vehicle
and shut down the engine. A heat soak ensues. You come out 15 minutes later
only to find the start will go CLICK but no cranking. You repeatedly
attempt to start. FINALLY ... on about the 20th try the starter suddenly
cranks over the engine like nothing ever happened. This can happen to an
otherwise perfectly good starter simply because it is too close to an
exhaust pipe and/or is getting old. It's telling you one or both of those
two things.
--

--
~ Philip

"Libertarians have something in common
with feral people. Freedom from rules"


<mei.chen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1137179914.657532.78050@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...[color=blue]
> Hey everyone,
> Just want to give some advice back to the general public. If your car
> won't start, yet you do have power, and you hear clicking noise but
> nothing else, it may NOT be your starter or that the contacts on your
> starter are wore out. It maybe just that you have a bad battery
> connection that gives just enough power for you to think that it is not
> the battery, and yet not enough power to get the starter started!!!
>
> So here's the long story of why:
> Recently my Corolla won't start at seemingly random intervals and
> exhibits the symptoms described above. So as any good engineer would
> do, I go on Google and read up on my car's problem. Well, majority of
> the groups and discussions online says that if you have power and hear
> clicking noise but no start, then it must be the starter's contacts
> wore off. So, I followed the advice and banged the starter couple of
> times with a rod (no result) then changed the starter all together.
> The problem seem to subside for a while, and then resurfaced again!
> And interestingly, whenever I call AAA to tow my car, they always
> manage to start it just by jumping the battery, even though I tried
> that many times w/ my friend's cars w/o any results. This lead me to
> believe that perhaps I have a bad battery, one that fails to charge
> while I drive, hence have its charge drained during wet weather (I've
> noticed by then that it only happens on a rainny day). So I took my
> battery to AutoZone to test it. It was fully charged. Then finally, I
> noticed that my battery has a bit of acid leak that may have caused a
> bad connection for the cables. So I cleaned it, and now, my car starts
> everytime!
>
> Every car problem seems to be different, but I'd recommend giving this
> a try before spending $200 on a new starter like I.
>
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