Date:         Tue, 2 Oct 2001 19:33:11 -0700
Reply-To:     radish150 <radish150@EARTHLINK.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         radish150 <radish150@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject:      Starter hesitation
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854";
              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"

Hey all, bet yawl thoughtcha got rid of me huh? Not !


Just thought I'd touch in and say hey. I've put about 10K miles on that rebuild of mine that I thought I was hearing a noise in when I was done...? I guess it must have been an exhaust noise cuz it has not changed a whit and it's still going strong.

For those of you with 85's or so with that silly "starter hesitation" problem, don't hesitate to add a relay or ford starter solenoid. Mine has been flirting with not starting for quite a while and I just got sick of it today and added a ford solenoid. Really easy, and now it fires off with no hesitation at all. Funny though, I just sold a 928 porsche,
and I had to do the same thing to it! I'll bet in the case of the porsche, it was a bad ground or something, but it did fix it.

For those of you who wanna do it, it's easy.

Disconnect your battery.


Run a medium gauge wire from the main power supply terminal from the starter to any one of the two large terminals of a generic ford starter solenoid.

Disconnect the large red/black wire that clips to the lower of the two starter wire terminals, and clip it in two about 5 inches from the starter.

Splice a wire into the short 5 inch lead (the one you just clipped leading to the starter) and connect it to the other large power terminal on the solenoid, and reconnect the other end back onto the starter where it came from.

Connect the other end of the wire you clipped (the long one leading into the harness of your van) into the other small "s" terminal on the solenoid.

Mt the solenoid on one of the large vertical x member surfaces a foot or in front of the starter with self tapping screws (this is the ground).

That's it, no more hesitation. You can solder if you want, or you can use good crimp connectors and heat shrink (I did not use heat shrink Ha). If you use crimp connectors just make sure that you use a very good crisper tool that really gets a major bite on the connections, not those crappy-cheapies.

Wish I'd done this long ago.

mark...