My gs400 has just recently started having a few problems and seeing if anyone can help me figure out what it may be before I have to take it into be fixed unless I can do it myself. The car is clicking when I try to start it and will do this 5 to 10 times until finally it will start up, I think this is the alternator since it's the one part I have yet to ever replace. It just now started to overheat too, never in the red but my car has never gotten hot before and I just started noticing within the last day or two that it's getting hot, about 3/4 of the way up the thermostat. I'm wondering if the two problems are consistent or unrelated. When I bought the car I immediately replaced the starter, head gasket, timing belt, drive belt, and upper and lower oil pan gasket it think it was and also the water pump. This was about 4 years ago and have put on about 40k miles in that time so maybe one of those things has gone bad, also the car has a brand new battery so that is not the problem. Can anyone help me figure out what may be causing this? Is there a relay or something that will keep it from starting up the first few tries because it its starting to want to overheat??? And the alternator has nothing to do with the temp of the motor correct?

 

Clicking usually means the starter. Alternator can contribute to engine heat if its ceasing up putting a load on the engine, but I doubt that's causing it.

 

try testing your alternator. have all electronics ON ( headlights, radio with cd, windshield wipers....) using a multimeter make sure you're getting above 13v on your battery. lack of voltage can do a lot of funny things to our cars. replaced my alternator last week because it was making a whining noise and the ABS light kept popping up on every other start up...

 

It's a starter, This is exactly how they go in the 1uzfe vvti I just did this job in my car.