I've got an embarrassing fix- The other day I was "stuck" in downtown
Los Angeles at night in my Volvo 740 Turbo wagon. The solenoid would
only click- not turn the motor over, and to make matters worse I was
parked too far from the curb on a busy street. Horns would blare as soon
as I got the drivers door open half way!
I preceded to bang on the starter with a 5 foot sledge hammer, to no
avail. I banged harder and harder from different angles in darkness, but
nothing worked. Eventually I realized I had broken off the solenoid wire
with the hammer, so I wired a new one to the battery. At this point I
realized the large starter wire on the battery had simply slid out of
the connector. I temporarily replaced this with a jumper cable, and
jumped the solenoid with a section of wire and it fired right up!
Triumphantly I waited for a gap in traffic and prepared to drive off.
Once I got inside the car, the car wouldn't respond to throttle, and the
battery was reading only 10v. I got back out, and realized I had
destroyed a throttle linkage rod with the hammer, and the alternator
wire no longer made good contact with the battery terminal either. I
made a temporary throttle linkage from some spare electrical wire, and I
wired in the alternator with the jumper cable I had used to run the starter!
So far so good, the car drove off perfectly. A few minutes later on the
freeway the headlight started to dim- the alternator was no longer
charging. I searched and searched for an exit or shoulder to pull off
in, but there was nothing for what seemed like miles and miles. I shut
off my headlights a few times, but it didn't seem the safest thing to do
in the aggressive high speed traffic of Los Angeles.
Finally I made it to an exit, reconnected the jumper cable which had
slid off the alternator, and made it back home without issues. A couple
seconds with a crescent wrench on the battery terminal would have
prevented all of this!
Tyler
'87 190D Turbo
winmutt wrote:
I have ignored 2 issues on my car for many moons now, sometimes
failing starter and sometimes faling back window. I assumed the worst
for both, sticky solenoid for the starter and bad wiring for the
window. With the starter I would hit it with ye old 9 iron and it
would start fine. The window seemed to come and go as my daughter
would get in and out of the car. Well last week my wife made a comment
about how the starter issue reminded her of my first car when we first
met. Needless to say I wasn't going to take that laying down!
Sunday I headed down to the junkyard for a starter and the second car
I looked in was pure gold, turbo and trans were gone and the starter
was all but hanging there. I got back home and got the car up and
started undoing the wiring for the starter. Much to my suprise I found
the signal wire to be loose! I screwed it down and voila! starts
everytime.
I started testing the switch at the door and found the + signal dead
on g+b wire. Tracked it down to just a dirty switch at the center
console, another easy fix!
Nothing beats cold ice tea on a sunday afternoon in the hammock and
the satisfaction of a job well done (without even breaking a sweat).
-Rolf
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_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
