Alamarmoore

Ok so my car wont start anymore. Its not the battery cause i took one from my toyota avalon and put it in there to see if it started. It doesnt and that battery is a year old. Anyways, the car stays on when started but when i shut it off and start it again it just clicks once. I think it might be the bypass safety switch or the starter. does anybody know what it might be?

BAN HAMMER

its possibly a bad ground. make sure your ground wire is on the battery tight, and check the connection to the block as well. also see if your hot wire from the starter is loose.

Fabrik8

Sounds like a power or ground problem with the battery cables. It's easy to diagnose with a voltmeter when the engine is running.

Alamarmoore

its the starter i tapped it and it didnt spark. But im also gonna check the hot wire and all the grounds. I checked the starter relay and try to jump which didnt work. checked the battery at my job and its fine but i didnt check the volts with the meter. i cleaned all the corrosion on the terminals also. and thanks too.

240sxkid

u talking about the 240??

Alamarmoore

lol. no a DB1 integra

D&SAutoServices

Def check your grounds, normally the problem when you hear just the one click... when the battery is weak you usually hear several clicks. It sounds like there is a short somewhere.

Alamarmoore

yea i just changed the starter and its not the starter so im about to check the starter relay and grounds. the click noise is from the starter relay. does that mean its bad?

Fabrik8

The click usually means that the starter isn't getting enough current to work properly, but the starter relay is engaging. The relay takes much lower current to operate, which is the entire point of using a relay. A bad battery power or ground connection is often the problem. I've had a few cars that have done that.

The easiest way to check what's going on is to take a multimeter and see if the battery voltage changes while you're trying to start the engine. You obviously need a friend for this. If you check voltage on the battery terminals, you're not going to find out anything (unless your battery is weak). You need to see what happens when you use the engine block as the ground reference, so you're including the ground cables as part of the measurement.

Also try using the positive battery cable clamp to measure from instead of the positive battery post, which will show if you have a corrosion problem or broken cable clamp.

Assuming the starter works fine (which I think is the case), you'll probably see a pretty big change in voltage between the engine block and the positive battery terminal. This will be a much greater voltage drop than you will see looking across just the battery terminals.

If you understand how a multimeter works, you can also check voltage between the block and the negative battery terminal. This shows the same thing as you what you did before, but it will show the voltage drop between the grounds directly. For some reason this confuses the hell out of most of the people who try it; apparently a difference in voltage from one ground to another ground is a hard thing to comprehend, but your mileage may vary.

So anyway, you'll most likely see a pretty good difference in voltage when looking between the engine block and battery positive with the multimeter. What this says is that you've got a lot of resistance somewhere between the block and the battery negative post. This is what is causing a restriction to the current flow going to the starter. Usually this is caused by corrosion on the cable, corrosion on the battery, a broken cable clamp not making proper contact, etc.

I will stress that you need to look at the voltage when you're trying to start the car. You won't see much (if any) voltage drop if there isn't any current going through the cables, so you'll think there isn't any problem and you'll look still be stumped.

Alamarmoore

Well I checked the fuses and the starter signal wasnt working. i used a tool to see if it was getting power to it, and its not getting power from the battery. Also, the starter positive cable isnt working which i think is connected to the starter signal. So i think its a sortage somewhere. Everything else works fine.