Fix It

There are three wires that connect to the rear of the starter solenoid on most cars. If you forgot to label these wires and incorrectly reinstalled them, the starter will not work at all. Double-check the wiring of the starter against a wiring schematic for the starting system and adjust it, as needed.

Any time you replace any electrical component on your vehicle that has constant voltage from the battery, you must disconnect the battery prior to servicing it. If you left the battery connected while installing the starter, it is possible for you to unintentionally touch the power and ground cables together. This may cause a short inside the battery or in the wiring, resulting in the car not starting. Check the voltage coming into the starter, using a voltmeter. If little or no voltage comes into the starter, inspect the wires and battery for shorts.

It is possible that the starter was not the problem to begin with. If not correctly diagnosed, it is easy to mistake many other problems with starter failure. Some problems that result in similar symptoms as a failed starter include, but are not limited to: failed ignition switch, discharged battery, loose battery cables, security system failure, failed starter solenoid (if separate) or damaged flywheel or flexplate.

When the manufacturer builds a new starter or rebuilds an old starter, it tests the starters prior to shipping them to retail stores or end-users. This testing typically catches any failed starters prior to shipment, but human error does allow for a small percentage of failed starters to ship out. After checking the areas described in the three previous sections, remove the starter and take it to a local parts store to have it tested. In the future, have all electro-mechanical components tested before installing them.

Rotors and drums exist to act as a friction surface for the pads to press against, meaning that at some point theyll have to turn several thousand pounds of forward momentum into thermal energy. The pads need to be almost as strong as the rotors to deal with the thermal and shearing stresses involved with braking, which is no mean feat when the rotors are made of hardened steel. Over time, the hard pad material will begin to eat the softer parts of the rotor surface, sometimes wearing it down evenly and other times leaving grooves on the surface.

Warped rotors and drums are a result not of rapid heating, as conventional wisdom may have it, but of uneven cooling. Overusing the brakes will overheat the rotors, possibly to the point of glowing red or white hot. At these temperatures, metal acts more like a very slowly flowing liquid than a solid, so it may not assume the same shape once it cools down. Certain parts of the rotor will inevitably cool and contract a little faster than others, pulling some parts of the material in while other parts remain stationary. This causes warpage or "runout," which is a waviness in the rotor that causes brake pedal pulsation afterward.

Resurfacing is usually done with a lathe. The rotor goes on a lathe, and a cutting head passes over it to eliminate ridges and waviness. You dont necessarily have to resurface rotors during a pad change, since the rotors are far harder and should, by nature, outlive the pads. Rotors vary in terms of allowance for groove depth, as some rotor faces might be thicker than others. The only way to know for sure is to check your manufacturer recommendations regarding acceptable runout and groove depth. General Motors, for instance, allows for a fairly deep scoring of 1.5 mm before requiring machine work (AA1 Car Library, Understanding Brake Rotor Service). The rule of thumb is that grooves deep enough to catch a fingernail warrant some resurfacing.

Oddly enough, there is some logic in putting off machine work until the manufacturer requires it. One of the oldest tricks in racing is to use a very thick rotor or drum, and then intentionally score it on a lathe to create a sharply grooves surface. Those deep grooves will increase the rotors surface area; once the pads bed in and conform to the rotor, they can provide significantly more clamping force than they would with a perfectly flat surface.

While no ones suggesting that you engage in any such idiocy with your street car and stock-thickness rotors, its something to bear in mind when considering a pad change without resurfacing. Until the pads bed in and conform to the shape of an un-machined rotor, their reduced contact area guarantees that the new pads will provide less initial stopping power than old pads with the same rotors.

The concepts of putting something other than gas in the gas tank allegedly originated in the 1996 movie, "Kingpin," where sugar was placed in a victims gas tank.

If the tank was filled up with sand to the brim, it could damage the engine. Snopes.com notes that most cars contain a "sock" at the end of the tanks pickup tube that prevents anything that is not liquid from entering. The cars fuel filter should collect any remaining sand from entering the engine.

A complete flush of the tank and a change of the fuel filter should fix the problem. This kind of repair could range anywhere from $450 to $500.

A locking gas cap might be a good investment. Speedconcepts.net offers several varieties for different vehicles in the $30 to $40 range.

A lot of things can go wrong with a brake rotor. Most obvious are mechanical faults like grooves in the rotor caused by harder particulates in the pad material, cracks in the rotor and waviness or warping in the rotor surface. A front brake rotor must regularly absorb about 30 to 35 percent of all of the energy that goes into moving your car, which creates a lot of heat. Heat, among other things, causes the rotors metal to expand; when the metal cools and contracts, certain zones in the metal will cool faster than others. The uneven cooling pull those zones in different directions, causing the rotor surface to warp and become wavy. Extreme heating can also affect the metals crystalline structure, causing even bigger long-term problems.

All brake rotors that arent brand-new exhibit a certain amount of grooving on the rotor surface. When the grooves are microscopically small, the peaks between the grooves will cut into the brake pad material. Simultaneously, the harder particles in the pad will resist this cutting and abrade the sides of those grooves. Eventually, the grooves will get large enough to be visible and cut large, matching grooves in the pad. So, its not a matter of if the grooved rotor will cut into your pad -- and vice versa -- but rather how far and how much the pads will deepen those grooves. If the rotors dont exhibit grooves deep or sharp enough to catch a fingernail, then you can replace the pads without machine-work or replacement. You can put new pads on a deeply-grooved rotor, but bear in mind that a) it will take some time for the pads to "bed in" and conform to the grooves in the rotor, b) while bedding in, the pads will rapidly accelerate groove widening and c) grooves create weak points in the rotor, increasing the odds that it will crack or shatter.

A warped rotor could easily eat your new pads alive, and may damage other, more expensive parts in the brake system. This is particularly true for some cars with antilock braking systems. An ABS system works by boosting or dropping brake pressure to each wheel. If the crests of the waves in your rotor are further apart than the pad is long, then the entire pad will drop in between the waves. When the crests come along, theyll shove backward on the pad, creating tiny fluid pressure fluctuations in the brake lines. These oscillations can damage the antilock brake pressure modulator, which costs far more to replace than itll cost you to have the rotors machined flat. So, if your rotors are warped, new rotors are advisable, particularly since new rotors arent usually much more expensive than machining. And, after machining, youll wind up with thinner rotors that are more prone to overheating and structural failure.

This little-known, but endemic, problem has both plagued and bewildered brake mechanics for a century or more. Long ago, mechanics noticed that, after the rotors for warpage or overheating, cars would often roll back into the shop when the rotors re-warped a few months later. And the re-warping problem has existed as alternately a puzzle or a myth -- depending upon who you asked -- since then. But, fairly recently, engineers have discovered that, following an episode of extreme overheating, the areas of the rotor that got the hottest would change in crystalline structure from the normal ferrite structure to the far harder cementite. Cementite, also known as iron carbide, is much like a ceramic and has far different properties in terms of hardness, abrasiveness and thermal conductivity. Think of chunks of oak floating in frozen ice cream, and youve got the right idea. Once these cementite spots form and penetrate the rotor surface to more than a few nanometers, the rotor is shot and will quickly self-destruct.