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When that happened to your chevette, did it occur twice in a row?
John,
No, it did not happen twice in a row. It happened intermittently, with no predicatable pattern and with two different solenoids.
It actually happened more than twice (maybe 10 times in total) and lucky enough, in most cases the contact broke free after a few seconds or by tapping on the starter. Only one event was near catastrophic.
The Chevette was my wife's car and it took a while until I believed her that something was seriously wrong (when the car nearly went up in flames in the parking lot of a Safeway).
The second time it happened was with a new solenoid -- and that's how I learned about the battery voltage.
I guess the reason why there was no predictable pattern is that on the Chevette, the starter contact is a disc around the plunger of the solenoid. The disc is free to turn about the center axis, so pitted areas on the disc may not interfere the next time the starter is being used.
The starter solenoid on the Chevette seemed to be a weak point altogether and needed to be replaced about every 18 months. When it started to fail again (for the thrid time while the car was in our posession, but I knew from the PO that he had also replaced it twice before) my wife didn't trust the car anymore and we bought her a more reliable vehicle.
Cheers,
Ruedi
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