hey whats up. well i just installed an auto-starter in my friends 95 4 door civic. it worked fine and everytime was great. the next day he calls me and tells me that the car shut off on him while he was driving it and he couldnt get it to start back. so i go check it out to make sure all the connections in the auto starter unit are intact and it's not shorting out anywhere. everything was wired up perfectly. so i go check other things around his car and try to start it up. his car was dead cuz it was sitting on the side of the street for a week without being started. so i tried to give him a jump start from my car. the car wouldnt start at all. it would turn the engine over for like 2 seconds then die out. we changed the battery for a new one and the same thing happened. so i figured the alternator is probably dead cuz it's not taking the charge. just to make sure that the alternator was the culprit, i told him to turn the head lights on in his car and the light was very dim. i then touched his battery with mine from the booster cables expecting the light to get brighter, but they didnt. So im pretty confident that his alternator is bad.

What do u think before i go and pull out his alternator?

cliff notes:
-installed autostarter, with all the wiring correct
-friends car died next day while driving
-car doesnt turn over even with a jump start
-assumption:alternator is bad?

 

That doesn't sound like an alternator to me. Was the battery light on in his car before it died on him? When your alternator is going the light will be on and often if you rev the car to a higher rpm the light will go out because it's turning alot quicker. Also, if you put in a new battery the car would start and run until the battery died. The alternator just charges the battery. I've had a few alternators go and I'll usually limp the car home. Then if it dies I put in a fresh, fully-charged battery and I can go for awhile longer.

Also, his lights should have gotten brighter when you hooked your battery to his via the jumper cables. This doesn't have anything to do with the alternator. I would go over your wiring some more because it looks like that could have caused a problem. Good luck, electrical problems suck to diagnose.

 

damn it. im stumped now. i'll recheck all the wiring again.

but the thing that has me is that my friend was driving the car then it shut off all of a sudden. he couldnt get the motor to crank over and it sounded like the battery was dead. so we changed the battery and tried to start it. still nothing happened. i even tried to jump start it but it would only slowly crank and then die out. it's loosing power somewhere.

hmmmmmmmmmmm, what can it be????? all the fuses are good. is there a relay or something else that i should check?


on the auto starter, i only spliced into the constant power, the ignition wire, starter wire, a brake light wire, and had a ground wire run.

 

don't know a whole lot about electrical stuff yet, but have you thought about whether or not the way you spliced in and where might have created a closed circuit that has power running through it all the time, draining the battery, creating a parasitic draw? Just a thought.

 

i'll rewire everything up again and see what happens from there

 

Check the ignition switch. If you can jiggle the key and make it start its bad.

 

no, it wont turn if i jiggle it. the motor will crank over when i turn the key to the start position but then it will stop cranking like 2 seconds later cuz it is loosing power/voltage.

 

You might want to check the ground. I had a problem with a bad/loose ground on my battery which did the same thing. Might be as simple as a bad ground. Hope that helps.