My dad's LT1 swap has been giving him nightmares the last few weeks. The car has eaten 3 starters now because the starter will randomly engage while he's driving. He figured out that the key in the on position would make the starter engage and thought it was a bad steering column, so I helped him swap it out. After putting in a new steering column, he ate another starter this past weekend.

He says that when you go to start the car, as soon as you start turning the key, BEFORE IT EVEN HITS THE SPRING/GIVES YOU PRESSURE, the starter engages. Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?

 

It sounds like you have an issue that makes the starter engage randomly/too soon

 

Two possibilities:

Direct short between a 12v wire and the starter solenoid wire that rattles in and out of contact

Ign rod out of alignment with ign switch on the column. There is some adjustment

 

Odds are slim it would be bad adjustment on the column if you changed one out and have the same problem. This sounds like a short to me. The worst kind of problem, hard to track down because it could be anywhere in the harness between column and starter. With the ignition off, use a multimeter and test for continuity between the ignition hot and the starter wire to trigger solenoid. Wiggle the harness around while doing this to see if you can get continuity. If so, I would start at the plug in the column, and go on to unlooming the harness from there. Good luck, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

 

Could be just one strand of wire at the starter, that's all it takes.

 

Thanks, guess we'll start at the starter (no pun intended) and see if the purple wire is frayed or something simple like that and work our way back into the car.

 

Figured I'd post up our findings. We think we fixed the problem. The whole interior wiring and dash came out of another car and he noticed that when he would shake the shifter to get into neutral, it triggered the symptom mentioned above. So he took out the shifter plate and found three snipped wires that were just laying there, have no idea what they were originally from in the '92 RS that the interior wiring came out of. I'd image it was part of the automatic shifter wiring since the dash came out of an auto/305TBI car. Anyways, one of the wires would ground out to the metal floor and made the starter engage. We taped off those three wires and he hasn't had a repeat of the problem yet.