So the old Prizm has been sitting for about a week, went to go fire it up, cranks slow (to be expected, battery is getting old) and makes a weird muffled grinding/groaning noise, I react to this and let go of the key just as it catches, sputters briefly, and dies.
I try it again, paying attention this time, same noise, starts, barely running without throttle input, like it has a big parasitic load on it, loud straight cut gear groan/whine sort of sound that changes with RPM, I shut it down after about 5 seconds, pop the hood, make sure it the engine has oil in it (it does), and smacked the starter gearbox with my breaker bar handle for good measure.
Try again, starts and goes into high idle normally, same noise but less of it for a few seconds, then it settled down into it's usual cold high idle with the slight higher pitched whine it's always made. Moved around the driveway fine.
What the hell? Something in the starter? Accessory drive?
Starter gear stuck engaged?
Stefan
MegaDork
1/27/17 4:59 p.m.
In reply to Knurled:
yup, especially with an old battery.
Get a new battery, check and clean the connections/battery wires and if it doesn't improve then get a new starter.
Thinking about it more the starter gear not retracting (that would be the overrun not overrunning, right?) is probably right. With the barely above freezing weather the last week I wonder if it didn't just have some ice in there from condensation buildup. It's wasn't cranking that slow, just slower than I expected for the weather, battery was good enough that it cranked over ok when it was down around 0 a while back.
Load test the battery but I would say the starter is about to give up. In fact it may be the starter that is failing that is pulling lots of juice and the battery may be ok. The grinding gear noise was almost certainly the starter failing to disengage. If the solenoid is going bad it would cause the disengagement issue as well as a low amperage to the starter motor due to high resistances in the solenoid.
You don't want that starter gear to get hung up on the flywheel. Ask me how I know. I ignored that once and was rewarded with the gear falling out and jamming between the flywheel and the bellhousing at 6000 rpm. Snapped the crank just inside of the rear main seal. It took three hot tank sessions to get all the shavings out of the block.
Well, I decided to drop the starter out to tear down and inspect and relube everything, this has proven to be a mistake.
Is there some trick to getting that lower starter bolt out of a 1ZZ? The top one came out hard (but looks nice), the bottom one I've gotten about a half turn on but it doesn't seem to be backing out, or breaking off. Not sure If I want to leave it alone and hope it keeps working, or snap the berkeleyer off and ride around with one bolt holding a known good starter in.
Edit for posterity: The lower bolt is not in a blind hole, at least on a manual car, the hole comes out kinda behind the slave cylinder with the end of the bolt set in a few mm, you can find it feeling around in there and drown it in penetrating oil by more or less setting the can down on the splash shield. Hopefully letting it soak for a day will help.
I did manage to get the stupid bolt out, you just have to soak the E36 M3 out of it and take the passenger undertray splash shield thing out (only broke 2 out of 6 bolts!) to get at it with an impact with a long extension and a swivel. Starter came apart ok, after beating it out of the hole in the bellhousing (berkeleying Michigan). Grease in the bendix support bearings and bendix helix was pretty dry and nasty, and the freewheel clutch was kinda sticky, that was probably the issue. Worked some oil into the freewheel and got it running smooth, cleaned and regreased everything and put it back together, seems to work again.
The solenoid contact on the battery side looked to be near the wear limit, but I didn't feel like waiting for new ones and the somewhat alarming crack in the aluminum case from the steel stator housing on the motor rusting (berkeley you Michigan) will probably kill it before then anyways.
