Well, it's been a few years since I've had to turn a wrench on the ole Slade, but she finally stung me. Saturday I decided to give it a good spring bath, so I moved it around in the driveway in the morning, it cranked a little slow, but had been sitting for a couple days, so I didn't think much of it. Gave it a nice wash, wiped down the interior, etc. Once done, I went to move it again - very slow crank, but started. Battery is only a year old (and a good AGM unit), so I tossed the charger on it for a few hours and 4ish hours later it was showing fully charged. Tried starting it, this time, it wouldn't crank fast enough to fire.
So, brought out my battery tester, battery tested good. Checked the battery connections, cleaned the terminals, slid under and checked the main grounds, etc. Eventually diagnosed as a bad starter...At about 6pm on Saturday before Easter. My go to, PartSource, was closed, but a Canadian Tire about 20 minutes from me had one in stock, so I whipped over and grabbed it before closing.
So today, after the Easter egg hunt, I went out to swap the starter. Super tight access, but at least it's accessible without taking a bunch of other stuff apart. The worse part was getting the connections off the back, and then re-attaching them, the second worse part was the amount of grease/oil on everything from my 7 years of annual oil sprays...Just insanely greasy. Took about 1.5 hours, including 15 minutes of wresting the new unit back into position....Try it, cranking over great, but now it won't fire!
Turns out, the CPS is just above the starter and when I was wrestling with it I broke one of the wires going into the connector. Guess what though; in order to access that connector, the starter has to come back out....So, pulled it out again, got to the CPS connector, pulled it apart and re-pinned the broken wire, soldered it back up to the harness, got some heat shrink on it, and then wrestled the damn starter back into it's hole. Turning a 1.5 hour job into a 4 hour job.
All is well now and the old girl cranks over stronger than ever...but what an irritating way to spend half a day, on Easter too.
Here's how I was working, had to work right where it was, luckily this all happened at home. Nice to be working near the sidewalk so I could greet all the Easter visitors in the neighborhood with grease up to my arm pits.
Here's the old unit....Looks pretty crusty, that primary wire from the solenoid to the unit looks pretty heavily corroded- that might have been the problem.
