Starter Questions

[90 suburban]

This a late post on starter issues but thought I would share the fix to my ongoing starter problem with my 1990 Suburban. Totally rebuilt this truck for the second time about a dozen years ago. The rebuild was a body off restore which included engine, tranny, and rear end rebuild. For a number of years the direct drive starter worked as it should even with the headers (coated) close to the unit. Eventually heat soak and cable weakness began to show up after the truck had been run up to full operating temps. Meaning the starter would be very slow to turn over the motor when hot.
Tried a new starter which only helped for a little while.
Then decided to bypass the chevy solenoid that's mounted on the starter by installing a "ford" type starter solenoid on the firewall.
This worked okay for a number of years though the motor always seemed slow to turn over after getting hot. After the remote solenoid aged it would even completely quit turning over the motor.

Finally decided to replace and reroute all the battery cables and go back to the original chevy design.

The fix was:
new direct drive starter
new cables
an additional battery ground to the alternator bracket
a starter heat shield wrap
and finally a 10 gauge wire routed from the negative battery post to a bolt on the back of starter body.

The motor now turns over at new car like speed no matter how hot it is. Really nice to be able to run in somewhere and turn the truck off without having to wait for it to cool down enough to restart.

 

[Bextreme04]

This a late post on starter issues but thought I would share the fix to my ongoing starter problem with my 1990 Suburban. Totally rebuilt this truck for the second time about a dozen years ago. The rebuild was a body off restore which included engine, tranny, and rear end rebuild. For a number of years the direct drive starter worked as it should even with the headers (coated) close to the unit. Eventually heat soak and cable weakness began to show up after the truck had been run up to full operating temps. Meaning the starter would be very slow to turn over the motor when hot.
Tried a new starter which only helped for a little while.
Then decided to bypass the chevy solenoid that's mounted on the starter by installing a "ford" type starter solenoid on the firewall.
This worked okay for a number of years though the motor always seemed slow to turn over after getting hot. After the remote solenoid aged it would even completely quit turning over the motor.

Finally decided to replace and reroute all the battery cables and go back to the original chevy design.

The fix was:
new direct drive starter
new cables
an additional battery ground to the alternator bracket
a starter heat shield wrap
and finally a 10 gauge wire routed from the negative battery post to a bolt on the back of starter body.

The motor now turns over at new car like speed no matter how hot it is. Really nice to be able to run in somewhere and turn the truck off without having to wait for it to cool down enough to restart.

Did you progressively change one thing at a time to see if one of these things was a smoking gun, or was it all changed at once? My thought would be a voltage drop test between the battery and starter to see if the battery or cable ends were getting a bad connection when hot vs when cold. Then I would be looking at specific engine grounding. It could also potentially be a dirty mounting pad on the block, or corrosion on the bolts not allowing a good ground path(hence the 10 gauge ground to the back of the starter helping).