I have a 93 Jeep Grand Cherokee, love it to death but it’s being cranky. About a week ago I was having problems with it starting one day, it would crank but slowly and then it would start. I finally got it home and tried to crank it the next morning and it would crank very slowly and not turn over and eventually it stopped turning over all together and just went click when I’d turn the key.
I had a friend who knew more about cars than me come help, we took the battery to Advanced Auto and had them check it, it was more than fine, I took the starter next and it passed. We came back to the house and connected everything back up, it still wouldn’t work.
No I don’t know why, and he doesn’t know what he did but it suddenly started and worked fine, cranked like a champ and without hesitation.
It ran fine for about a week until today. It started very slow and I thought DANG, its starting again and I thought it’s happening again. I decided to see if it was just a one time fluke and decided to stupidly turn the car off instead of going home to do it. Well, the second time I wasn’t so lucky, it wouldn’t start. I called my friend back out and we couldn’t get it running again. He thinks its a connection problem somewhere but can’t figure out where.
Can anyone suggest anything or places to check? Next plan of action is changing the battery cables.
Take a look at the positive cables between the battery and the starter. Clean and check the ground connection to the engine block, good luck!
Check all ends of each battery cable and the cable between the engine and frame.
Good advice here. All the symptoms point to either a dead battery (checked out) or bad connections. That should be the only issue affecting CRANKING. Starters would be in the mix too, but when they start drawing too many amps it’s not an intermittent thing.
One obscure possibility …as in when all else fails, this could be a shorted battery. It can act 100% functional, even under testing, and then act up. It would not typically act like a battery going dead however, it would usually not sustain cranking at all and then magically fix itself until the next random event.
Took the starter off and had it retested and it failed. Went and put a new starter on it and it starts perfectly fine without a hitch. I don’t know what caused it to start working again but I guess it was just a fluke that lasted for only a week. Either way it’s fixed. Thanks guys.