No starter

TURBOTAIL

MEMBER
2002 HONDA CIVIC
2.0L
4 CYL
2WD
MANUAL
170,000 MILES

How do you tell if your starter solenoid is bad? My car won't turn over. The battery is fine. There may have been some moisture that got into some wiring when my overflow cap came off the radiator. When I try to start it there's some wispy gray smoke that kind of looks like a short. The car still drives fine with a push start. Won't jump. Lights are bright when it's running. No amps to starter. It will moan a couple of times trying to turn over then nothing. I cleaned the battery terminal posts and it helped for a couple of starts, now nothing. Ideas?
Thank you, G

1 Reply

MOTOR MASTER

MECHANIC
279 POSTS

Hello my name is Dave.

First thing I would check is that the ground cable has a good connection to the engine block, I have encountered this problem with quite a few Hondas. A simple way to check this is to take your jumper cables and hook one black clamp to the battery and the other to the engine block, making sure they are both making good contact. See if it will start once you do that and if it does replace your ground cable. If it doesn't then we need to make sure the starter is getting a signal, by that I mean power to the small wire leading to the starter. You will need a test light and what we'll want to do is test to see if you are getting power to the small wire going to the starter. Clip the ground clamp of the test light to the negative battery cable then unplug the wire and insert the test light probe into the end, have an assistant turn the key to start and see if the test light lights up. If it doesn't we will need to troubleshoot the electrical system further. Here is a link to our tutorial on using a test light to assist you in this process:

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/how-to-use-a-test-light-circuit-tester

If you can take these steps and update us on the results we will be happy to guide you further. We look forward to hearing back from you and thank you for using 2CarPros!