Check your starter relay.

 

Hey, thanks for the response. I pulled the dash and swapped the purple (starter relay) with one of the blues and the issue persisted. Not sure if that was a proper trouble shooting step however.

I think i'm earring a click from the relay when I try to start as well.

 

Do you have all three wires attached to the starter, know it sounds stupid but it won't turn offer if you dont itll just click.

 

On one hand I'm hoping you are right, on the other hand I will feel so stupid if I'm missing a wire.

However, no I only have 2 wires connected and to my knowledge that's all there is. There is the main power cable that runs off the positive terminal and then a smaller blue wire that has an adapter port that I plugged in.

 

From the symptoms, it appears that once the starter engages, the voltage drops too low for the starter to turn. Three possible causes:

1) Weak battery - 12.5V is low for a fully charged battery with no load. Under no load the voltage should be around 13V (13.2V to be exact). Try a simple test by jump-starting from another car.

2) Bad ground connection (from the battery to the car body/engine or from the body to the engine). Not sure how the 2009 Corolla is wired, but usually their are two ground cables connected to the battery, one attached directly to the engine, one connected to the car's body. There should also be a thick ground jumper between the engine and the car body somewhere, usually across one of the engine supports. My bet is on bad ground from the battery to the car body, but look around. Note that the bad connection may be on the end of the cable connected to the body/engine, not the battery.

3) Your starter has an internal short. With the battery fully charged (13V no load voltage), measure the voltage directly at the battery terminals while somebody turns the key. If the voltage drops below 10V, it's either weak battery or a shorted starter.

Hope this helps.

 

Okay,

Attached are 3 pics.

1 is of the starter with wires attached.

the second is of the 2 ground points there were cleaned to the right of the battery.

Last is the nut where the second ground point connects under the air filter housing.

 

Have you tried to jump start it with a battery from another car? Just to discard a defective battery.

 

where is the starter solenoid, on the starter? was it checked? did the new starter come with a new solenoid? Are the cables good? Is it in park when starting? Or, if manual trans is the clutch fully in?

 

have you tried tapping the starter again? The fact that this worked once raises questions for me. I think its irrelevant what NAPA said; when they tested the starter it worked, OK great. But if you can give it a couple of taps again and it starts again, you need to swap it out. I had an old Ford with a dying starter that I used to have to tap a few times to get it to turn over until I replaced it. The fun part was that sometimes it worked perfectly - could that be similar to when NAPA tested yours?

This is a 2min test and free, and if the car fires right up you've found the problem.

Your pics of the grounds don't show any issues that I can see.

If this doesn't do it then I also like the idea of jumping the car off another to see if it is a battery problem; the poster who noted voltages seems to be going down a logical path as well. Another quick easy free test.

 

Hey guys,

New member on this car forum hoping for some expert advice.

I've attached a video It hit explains it well.

Turn the key, hear a click and it power cycles.

Long story short I can't get it to start. I am moderately technically inclined meaning I can swap all your basic parts and do basic troubleshooting. On this vehicle as noted in the video I have changed the:

Battery - New Tests OK 12.54 Volts
Starter - Thought maybe I got a dud so I pulled it and took it back and it checks OK

Plugs (Changed after the breakdown as a troubleshooting measure)
Radiator (Changed after the breakdown because I broke the inlet hose nipple when changing the starter)

From the view in your video that you have made ......your positive battery cable does not look too good. I would make sure it has good contact from battery to the starter.

 

Get out your test light or buy one.
Get a couple of wires with alligator clips on each end, several feet long.
Connect one end to the starter where the wire goes from the solenoid to the starter itself.
Its the wire with no insulation, BE CAREFUL TO NOT LET IT TOUCH METAL DURING THE TEST, WRAP IT WITH CLOTH OR TAPE. When you try to crank it, if the light goes on, you have good continuity and the starter is suspect. If the light does not go on then you have a circuit interruption and need to trace the circuit further.
Every point where a connection exists is a potential problem. The bad connection can be where the terminal end connects to the cable itself at the battery. It can be at every ground connection between the starter and the negative battery terminal. Not sure what "test" they did to your starter, but I doubt seriously it was a 200 amp load applied to the gear when the starter was trying to crank.
Parts was the main reason why I retired from working on cars, other than the fact I could make $100 an hour tax free building my own house. Lousy replacement parts makes any complicated diagnosis almost impossible.
As a preventive maintenance I would clean every ground connection involved. That means remove the bolt, polish both sides of the cable end AND the body of the car, apply some grease to prevent further corrosion and reinstall the bolt. I even like to polish the threads and head of the bolt. Bad connections do not respond to visual inspections.
Use your test light to determine if there is no connection, even when everything looks good, you have to make SURE the connection is good and in some cases it will be good until you increase the load on the connection and then it fails.
Any bad connection will create the same symptoms.

 

I'm wondering now if you accidentally touched the chassis when you removed the starter.

 

If you possibly did that....im wondering if you blew the main fuse....thats the one in the engine compartment ....the little square one with the clear top and the copper link across it. If that blew...you wont even get a crank out of the engine.

 

Okay guys I'm just going to throw this out there because I did it once when I put in a new head unit.

I see that you have the dash half way removed. By any chance is the shifter not in PARK. If it's a manual disregard.

 

OC

Hey Guys, I feel sort of shocked and very stupid after hours working on this. Coincidentally, If i had not stayed up working on the problem well into dark then I still would be lost.

I was tinkering with grounds and I had my girlfriend get in and try to start it.

Out of my peripheral vision I saw an ITTY BITTY little spark shoot out of the positive cable terminal head.

I thought WTF was that?

Now with my attention on the terminal I asked her to crank it again.

Again a tiny little spark you could barely see in the dark.

It was then that I realized I am an ass****, grabbed a set of plier and gave the thumb screw that holds the starter plate onto the main terminal head a tight turn. I know before I even told her to try it was solved.

Essentially I had used the THUMBNUT to screw together that top plate as HARD as I could about 5 times during the various trouble shooting. The problem is that the plate is slightly concave so it didn't make contact. It needed to be TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT with pliers to make good connection.

Occam's razor

Thank you all for your tips and your help. You have a good community here and I will be sure to pay it forward.

To the next guy, I know you think you already checked the basics but check again, and again.

 

Glad that you were able to resolve the problem.
And thank you for letting us know - we can sleep well now.

 

I once told my grandmother when she told me she was stupid and did not know how babies were made when she was young.

You may have been ignorant, but you were never stupid. Ignorance is curable, stupidity is not.

Sometimes it takes another "helper" to make something obvious. When that small "spark" occurred it was the failure of a connection in a circuit. A test light connected past that bad connection would have failed to light when the connection was used to power the starter, absolute confirmation of the failure of that connection. Sometimes it is more than one connection that needs repair to make it function properly.

Kind of like an unwanted circuit breaker, when the 200 AMP load was applied (starter cranking) the connection was not strong enough to carry that huge load, the largest load by a large margin over any other load you use in an auto electrical circuit. I have actually seen the same spark when a customer came in for the same issue, intermittent no start.

To prevent this problem in the future, I like to solder the ends to my battery cables, if they give me any problem. Use a small butane torch get it hot and give it plenty of solder until the connection is permanent. Its good to clean the area being soldered as much as possible or use flux to make the soldered connection perfect.

Even it you had jumped the car it would not start and that would be the first "connection" in the path of current to the starter that could fail other than a corroded terminal.

As far as stupid, I disagree. The first diagnostic repair I ever did, 54 years ago was an my bug eyed Sprite when it would not start. It took TWO WEEKS to figure out that a spark could reach an "intact" wire at one end and not get to the other end. I learned about carbon cored plug wires the hard way and to this day will never forget that first diagnostic "fiasco". From now until your last breath you will remember this event and your lack of knowledge as far as that situation is cured permanently, a more polite way of saying ignorance, which everyone shares from their beginnings on this planet.