Temperatures finally rose high enough today to encourage me to tackle some outstanding jobs on the cars. Number one emergency was the Land Cruiser, which has had sticky starter syndrome for a few weeks now – right when it was needed to be at its most reliable! What happens is the starter stays engaged after the engine is running. If it goes on too long, the 24 volt starter can go up in smoke, so it’s an important job.
The problem is caused by worn starter contacts – fair enough after 18 years of service. Toyota do a repair pack, so I got some and took the starter off today to fit them. It’s easy enough to get the starters off these diesel manual trucks: undo the loom from the battery and split charge relay and take it all out, wiring still attached to the starter.
Taking the starter apart was easy once I had it out. I love how these starters are made: a single casting holds the solenoid assembly and the main body. Then the armature bolts up to the casting – talk about durable. I pulled the back of the starter solenoid off to find this:
You can see here that the solenoid plunger has been getting hot for a while. This is what it looks like on the other side:
It has basically welded what was left of the live contact onto itself! Looking at the contacts, it was clear I’d had my money’s worth. Just got there in time too by the look of it:
The contacts are two L-shaped pieces of copper. That is how they start out anyway. Also interesting here is that the insulators around the inside of the contacts are actually black like the outer ones – they only look red as they are covered in copper dust.
I’d lost the light by this stage, it was time to cook dinner and it was raining heavily too, so we’ll get it reassembled and back on the truck tomorrow. My super bike genius neighbour has just bought himself a lathe, so we might turn that solenoid plunger contact washer back to as-new condition before we reinstall.
