Hey Guys,

I Have a 1994 z28 fully stock with 115k miles.

Here's a funny story. Yesteryday i decided to go to pep boys to get a quick oil change because i didnt have the time to do it myself. I ended up waiting 2 hours because they couldnt start my car to pull into the garage. They ran a diagnostic on it and found out i had a bad starter. They were gonna charge me $550 but i told em to roll it out of their garage and i'd take care of it. I got it towed home and i ordered a new starter.

Today, I picked up the new Worldwide starter and replaced the old starter. I just tried starting my camaro, but all it did was make rapid clicking noises and the dashboard lights flickered at the pace of the noisemaking. Any ideas? Could it have been that i put the starter in wrong? I connected both cables to the starter and bolted both bolts back in the same spot...

 

Sounds like the battery is dead or there is corrosion on the battery terminals or the wires to the starter are corroded.

 

UPDATE: the battery was dead and after replacing it i was able to get it to start. BUT the only way it stayed on was for my to give it steady gas. It also makes a screeching sound like something is grinding. AS soon as i let off the gas the car dies.

Good news: car lives
Bad news: wont stay alive...

 

Did you check the clearance between the starter gear and the flexplate gear, and shim the starter accordingly?

 

Uh oh, i just bolted into the holes not really paying attention to the distnace between everything else...

 

I have just checked and noticed there is no shims at all. What sized shim do i use? I saw shoebox's shims but didnt see any measurements.

 

You need to measure the clearance between the tip of a tooth on the flexplate, and the root (bottom/between the teeth) of the starter gear. That clearance should be 0.020" (the shop manual shows it with incorrect decimal place). Use a wire spark plug gauge, or if you don't have one, use the wire from a standard (1.25" long) paperclip.

Shim it to achieve the specified clearance.

 

I was never able to use the gauge method on a starter with a nose cone.

Only the Denso (or Hitachi) type

 

Yeah, i cant get around the damn nose cone. Its a pain. Tried to use wire but i can never tell when its in or not. I decided to try different shims until it was close to perfect. I started at .03 then .06 then .12 then .15. The first three still had grinidng after start and the .15 had grinidng while starting. when i went back down to .12 it made grinidng noises during start. (got me frustrated) and then i went down to .105 and the initial start does not grind and at idle it does not grind, but it still makes the damn rock sound like theres a rock in the flywheel or something. I checked and didnt see anything. Would WD-40 do the trick? Idk whats up with it now.
Also, small amounts of white smoke came out of the tailpipe too when i drove it half way down the block to test, it made a loud knocking noise when accelerating.. (0-10 mph)

 

is your flywheel cracked?

 

You need to know that sometimes you need to shim one bolt and not the other. If the gear is too tight to the flexplate, you shim the bolt nearest the flexplate to move it away. If it is too far away from the flexplate, you shim the one farthest from it to move it toward it.

The quickest way to check is with a standard washer. If you put it in one and it does not get better take it out and put it on the other and try that. Then go back and shim more precisely a little at a time.

Now as far as once it's running, no matter what the shim quality is, it should NEVER be a problem while running since the gear drops away from the flexplate.

Marbles, clunking other weird sounds like that usually indicate the mounting bolt area of the flexplate is cracked. A normal occurrence for them OEM plates.

 

well i was finally fed up with this non sense and drove it to an autoshop a block away from my house. It ends up i perfectly installed the starter, but my engine rod was broken

Since being told replacing a starter has nothing to do with it.. and that i didnt have any problems until i went to pep boys. Im filiing a claim since i was also told by my local autoshop that my oil was black and that it did not look like neither my oil or oil filter had been changed in awhile. Talked to the pep boys manager and he told me they changed my oil... im leaning towards lawsuit

 

Gotta love the rent-a-mechanics at pep boys lol....

they think their the real deal, but wheres their certification? knowwhere....

goodluck with the lawsuit, they would prolly settle out of court to keep it on the hush hush....

 

Woa there buddy, got a few things to say about that. First, if you take care of your oil like you're supposed to, let's say you (or some company) changes it every 3000 to 6000 miles. Then skipping ONE oil change will NOT cause a thrown rod.

Lack of oil or low oil will cause a thrown rod. So does high engine revs. So this begs the question, how often do you check the oil? My wife even check's her own oil every other fuel stop.

You should be checking your oil often enough so that within a few hundred miles of the oil change, you should have seen the oil was black.

So if you feel like creating a lawsuit, go right ahead. Let's suppose you are savvy enough to do the paper work for such an event. You pay a small fee and place a warrant in debt with the local court against the entity that is listed as the registered agent with your state corporation commission. You know what a registered agent is right? Then their corporate lawyers request you file a bill of particulars. You know what that is also right?

Now let's assume you get in front of the judge. If you had to pay a lawyer to do all this, any award you would have gotten is now gone to pay the lawyer fees. NO you aren't going to be awarded fees so let that thought go right now.

However the first 2 points the opposition is going to bring up is: Dirty oil in and of itself will not cause a thrown rod. Second, if you had been checking the oil level like you should have, this would not have happened. Therefore the problem was caused by you.

Regardless of the way you or anyone else thinks, this is what will happen. I've been in the repair business for 32 years. I've seen and heard it all.

Oh yeah I just thought of something else. Your idea of a case against them would hinge on a receipt for an oil change that has the mileage on it AND you have to prove the mileage that the thrown rod occurred AND you would have to prove dirty oil did it. Can you produce all 3?????????

You're wasting ALL of you're time on this and you should be working on a solution. Start shopping for either a short block or a crate engine.

Edit: Just realized you had the problem THE NEXT DAY and they hadn't actually changed the oil. You have got to be kidding. So what changed from one day to the next? How is not changing the oil the cause of this?

I have some ocean front property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you.