Well tonight I got off work. Went to get in the TransAm. Turned the key and all I heard was TICK and everything that was on in teh car turned off.

I was like "WTF!?!?!" turned off the car and tried again.

The lights come on, battery has over 1100CCA so my tester tells me however the car just won't rollover. I called a towing company and had the car towed back to my house.

Any idea what can be causing this? Any idea how I can troubleshoot this?

 

Well, whenever this exact same problem happens to me, in any car I've driven, 79 TA, 91 Taurus, 2 91 TA's... It's been one of two things. Primarily it's been a bad connection at the battery. One or both cables had either got corrosion under them or just had a bad contact for some reason. If cleaning the connectors didn't work, wrapping a lil bit of copper wire around the connector bolts before reconnecting them to the batteries always did. The second and less likely reason I ran across was the starter connections. I had problems with keeping the wires in good shape and away from the exhaust and occasionally, one of the new wires would jiggle its way to a piece of hot exhaust, melt and ground out causing the same problem.

Either of these or possibly none of these could be the cause, but they're fairly easy to check, so it can't hurt any.

 

How's the ignition module?

 

check for power to the starter

 

Bad connection at the battery, where the cable hooks up.

It's not the ignition module.

It's not the timing.

It's not the EGR.

It's not "heat soak".

It's not any of those legendary mythical things that don't even exist, but people will blame everything on when they don't understand it. It's something nice and simple and ordinary.

Clean the battery contacts with a wire brush, and water & baking soda. Put some silicone dielectric grease on the connectors and the battery terminals to help keep them from corroding again.

 

yep out of all the times I've had that happen its always just a bad connection at the battery..

 

you guys were right. It was a bad connection at the battery. Ends up somehow the posts weren't tightened when we swapped out the old 600amp bat for the new 1125amp redtop.

Phew...so didn't want to have to replace the starter on this thing.