halzg
Member
Hello, a few minutes of searching didn't turn up anything quite like this, so I thought I'd post it for the common good. Monday afternoon, my car ('04 Jetta 5 speed with 109,000 miles) was very hard to start. It was cranking erratically, kind of like a loose battery cable clamp or when a starter motor goes bad. When I got home, I shut it off, and it wouldn't crank at all. I let it cool down, still no crank. Battery is good, cables were tight, so I expected to settle in for a starter remove / replace. When I got the starter exposed and removed the wire that triggers the solenoid, I found that the insulation was cracked, exposing bare wire, and the plastic connector fell right off the wire once I unplugged it from the solenoid. The wire had broken inside the connector, and there were burn marks like it had been arcing. I spliced in a new piece of wire with a crimp-on connector, and taped it up to provide some weatherproofing, and everything is back to normal. I saved the click-on connector to try to use it to make a more permanent repair.
Just one more thing to look at if you have a sudden, mysterious no-start.
Hal
Just one more thing to look at if you have a sudden, mysterious no-start.
Hal
