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To prove the bad ground:
Engine off; take your jumper cables and connect from clean engine block ground to the negative terminal of the battery. Using high quality cables. See if car starts on its own.
Mind you if the ground is bad the battery may not be charged properly or at all. Charge the battery.
Wombat - this is a 30 second test. Do what is written above and tell us what happens. Assuming your battery is healthy enough and the jumper cables are higher grade. i.e. thick jacketing means nothing about the conductor inside. Hopefully its a 4 gage cable with hundreds of fine copper strand wires.
Both wells dry as a bone in the desert and no error codes on the computer. So is there a reason the manual tells you to not connect to the negative terminal when jumping? Is there something that by going to a ground point you are bypassing? At the parts store they had a portable battery pack that when they hooked it up and I tried to start the engine there was a clicking like the starter was turning but the engine was not. They went and got another pack and hooked that one up and everything started up fine. Was the clicking from the solenoid not extending the starter far enough to engage with the flywheel? Does it take a minimum number of amps to make it all work? Or is my starter solenoid bad?
Yep, works every time. But why is this an intermittent problem? 1 out 4 starts today had no problem. The rest just took the jumper to bypass the ground. Is it a heat thing? When the car is hot - start it does not. Where can I find a wiring diagram to know where there are ground connections?
Last edited by Wombat58; Jun 24, 2019 at 11:28 PM.
Reason: Left off a question.
As the heat goes up so does the resistance of the wire. So rather than spinning the electric motor, the wire gets hot from a bad connection and literally makes more heat at the bad connection. So when a big load (starter) is applied it ALSO makes heat in the cable due to a bad connection.
So you have isolated it; that is good.
Disconnect the battery ground and flex the cable at the connector. Do you see broken strands? Pull on it. It should take 50lbs of force and not pull apart. Now follow that cable to the engine block. Unbolt it and inspect it. Flex and look.
Mind you the cable likely taps off to the body ground too along the way.
If nothing found clean the posts on the battery and cable and fully seat them.
This could be it here....
Notice cable bolted ahead of the engine mount.
Yep, works every time. But why is this an intermittent problem? 1 out 4 starts today had no problem. The rest just took the jumper to bypass the ground. Is it a heat thing? When the car is hot - start it does not. Where can I find a wiring diagram to know where there are ground connections?
Rusted / dirty ground. Apparently the heat from the small gap caused the bolt to eventually loosen and caused a gap. So as soon as the weather started getting hot the gap widened to a point were electrons would not flow. New bolt and a little terminal cleaner action and the problem went away.
