Cerbera hot start click remedy...read on...

[Robscim]

Gazzab said:

Take a look at abacus alarms website. They mention the alarm wiring being a cause.

I was told that by Carl Baker - he seems to know his TVR electrics!!

Rob

[johnbear]

fatjon said:

Whoa, dangerous experiment. When you take off the earth lead the return path to the battery is usually down the exhaust since the rest is usually insulated (rubber mounts, rubber pipes etc. Since the exhaust is hung on rubbers the current path is typically up the lambda sensor body then through the lambda ground wire which will not like 300Amps. If it does crank for more than a second or two you got lucky and the engine is grounded by fluke in some other way like gearbox - prop - diff - drive shafts - hubs - brake pipes or hubs - handbrake cable, though not necessarily a way you want to hit with 300 Amps of return to battery current, for example the ECU signal ground. If the path back to ground is quite poor, like the entire transmission system then the current will be shared with other paths in proportion to the resistance of each path, not good.

I did a little fiddling with the starter click problem and it seems to be that when the motor is getting on a bit and hot it takes a little more current to fully push out the solenoid until the main contacts make to power to motor. The relay solution is to take the solenoid feed and apply it to the coil of a relay to pull in the relay which switches a rather fatter live from the battery to the solenoid with less volt drop, giving the solenoid a bigger kick.

Thanks for the heads up - never considered the low amp wiring . Will re earth ASAP

[jackwibble]

It seems there are a number of issues can cause this fault I had the occasional click not starting problem a couple of years ago it gradually got worse and thankfully it was just a duff starter solenoid fitted a new one and touch wood been fine ever since.

[johnbear]

• Potential Fix **

Whilst setting about bolting the earth cable back onto the engine, I noticed that the vibration from the engine had separated the copper strands at the engine connector. I could best describe it as if I had untwisted the cable. I think the gaps between the strands cause current problems when the engine is hot and it might take more amps to turn over. I twisted the cable back and then soldiered the cable to fill in any gaps. It was easier than changing the cable. However, the hot start problem seems to have been cured.