> Scott #1,
>
> It seems to me that by now you would have resolved your
> starter problems. I have a suggestion. Early last spring
> a friend was just finishing a complete restoration on an
> MGA. He couldn't get the starter to turn the engine over.
> We went to his rescue. The bottom line was that he had
> painted both the engine backing plate and starter mount-
> ing flange. Although the starter worked great on the bench,
> the only way to get it to turn when mounted in the car was
> to jump it to ground with a battery cable. Once the paint
> was scrapped off both surfaces, everything was nice nice.
Well, there's good and bad news.
The bad news is that I still don't know why the car wouldn't
start.
The good news is that that's because both the starter and the
solenoid are bad. :-)
I tried, oh, a great many things this weekend. First, I
tried (more or less on purpose :-) shorting the two terminals
of the solenoid. Starter wouldn't turn. NAGS (new acronym,
Not A Good Sign.) So I disconnected the battery and pulled
the whole mess.
The solenoid-to-starter connection (a strap of copper with a U
in one end of it to go over the post) was tight (it was tightening
that that proved that the starter wouldn't turn over :-). So I
took the solenoid off. It was grimed inside, the posts were
loose, and the threads are all chewed up on the hot post. So
that's toast; gotta get a new one anyway.
As long as I was about it, I pulled the top off the starter.
What a weird way to put brushes onto an electric motor! I'm
used to teeny motors (16D, Super Wasp, and other slot-car motors,
for the rest of us who like to race itty bitty toy cars), where
the brushes grip the commutator. Inside the B's starter, the
brushes press against the flat end of the armature, which acts
as the commutator.
Or would if this starter worked. It's got some burned spots,
some loose insulation, and some general crud (read "The Cask of
Amontillado" and, for Poe's "nitre," the stuff that hangs from
the walls of the cave, read what I found inside my starter). It's
probably rebuildable. Anyone in the Bay Area who'd like one is
welcome to it as a core.
The best news, though, is that I'm finally in a position (at
least with starters) to be more lazy than broke, so I'm going
to (gasp) get a WHOLE NEW UNIT. Starter, solenoid, the works.
I'll put it in this weekend, with luck.
Oh, also, I found a spectacular British car tour road. Local
SOLs should keep a weekend open for a winter Britcar tour through
the middle of the Peninsula. Maybe for Groundhog Day!
--Scott
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