Re: Starter 97 Deville I had a starter that was doing everything you could imagine: Everything else worked -no starter.
Everything else worked - no starter solenoid.
Nothing at all worked
Nothing worked and the battery was dead.
And probably a few other intermediate states that I have forgotten about...
It's interesting to note that a car whose starter (and everything else) were missing-in-action, would randomly be fine a few hours later. (Outside temperature was not a predictor.)
I "went in" with the idea that one of the starter cables was damaged - Found not to be true.
Once you get in there you are pretty much committed and must do 'something' just to justify the exercise.
Before buying a starter, I decided to look inside. Lots of Carbon dust (from the brushes wearing over time. I cleaned the dust out reassembled the starter, and so far everything is just fine.
That's the equivalent of a starter "rebuild" unless you have a catastrophic metal damaging type failure.
Anyway it was a pretty cheap 'repair'. If you want to go in with the idea of rebuilding, you should of course buy a new set of brushes first.
On the matter of getting the armature shaft back into the space between the spring-loaded brushes (not so easy with only two hands), I found that a plastic prescription vial of suitable size made it pretty easy.
My guess is that the reason the starter was doing such weird things is that the significant deposits of carbon dust were shifting around and shorting the starter in unpredictable ways.
If this is a common set of symptoms, my guess is that the starter cleaning repair might be a widespread solution? |