lualchro

Just want to share with you!

My starter has always been kind of slow, not too bad but somehow slow, for about three days it went ultra slow, just like when you are running out of battery juice.

I took the jeep to a company that only dedicates to sell batteries, for them to test my battery or electrical system, all my electrical were good, battery load test good, acid density good, electrical consumption while the vehicle is off was good, and the resistance of the wiring going down to the starter was within
normal.

At night I went and took a look at the starter, the genius mechanic that put it back last time did not care about anything and put on the wrong screws, and actually only one was present and pretty loose, I thought that due to the screw being loose I may have been experiencing a ground failure on the starter, so I went to my screw bucket, and found the right thread and size screws for my jeep, tighten the starter good and give it a try.

Surprise, the starter solenoid did not want to do it's job, did not hear the "CLACK" sound and the starter did not engage, so I went and get a wood piece and proceed to hit the solenoid, while applying 12V to the signal side of the solenoid, after a couple of hits, the starter starter to spin, but still slow, or dead slow.

Took it off the jeep, and found that it has that particular fried smell on it, bench test it for electrical load, and it only draw about 1.3 Volt, something expected, took the starter apart, cleaned everything, good brushes, cleaned the solenoid and put everything together again, installed it on the jeep, same result, went to bed.

Next morning I rode the bike to work, talk to a local guy that has a Jeep junk yard, charged me 90 bucks for one coming from a 96 jeep, promissing me that it was on great shape (I know 90 will be an average cost of a replacement one in US, either Reman or New, from an average company however I'm in Costa Rica, and there's no one that sells new ones here, so I got this guy charging 90, and another one charging me 150, went the 90 route as he offered me a two months warranty on the used part)

Got home, installed it and my biggest surprise is that now the starter spins the engine about twice as fast as the old one on his good days.

The point here, is that bench testing the starter is not a 100% method, you need to have load on them to see if they actually are capable of handling the job, on the bench this two starters behave pretty much the same, but when it came to load turning the old 4.0, they performed absolutely different.

Just want to share with all of you

Happy 2014 for all!

Luis

Cherokee89

Have had the same problem with a few Renix starters, very slow.
All starters have been full of oil and grime and 25+ years old.
My solution was to take them apart and clean everything and then give the moving parts a little oil and change the brushes if needed.
Cost here is about $ 300-350 for a new starter, $ 100-150 for used one or $ 30 for a set of brushes so a little time and cleaning save me a few 100 of $.
So $ 90 for a starter is not bad, to keep the Jeep running.