The other day my car would just crank but it would not start, I let the vehicle set for about an hour and tried again and it started right up!!!!!!, I drove it to a dealer down the street from my job O'neil Nissan and the tech could not find anything wrong with my car (fuel pressure ok, it was getting spark from the ignition coils) The tech said something about my engine possible having a grounding problem? has anyone heard anything like that before. Anyway I took my car from the shop and decided to get to the bottom of this problem myself. From time to time my car starts up on the 2nd or 3rd try when starting the car. I have done all of the required maintenace(changing spark plugs,fuel filter, cleaning out the Throttle body assembly) and it still doesn't start up on the 1st attempt. I'm leaning towards replacing the ECT sensor (engine coolant temp) even though it is not triping the Check Engine Light. Any ideas?

 

what about before your car wouldn't start? did you just recently move it and turn it off? was it sitting for a while...mo info please

 

If you wanted to pursue the idea of a bad ground, you could use one of the ground "upgrade" write-ups that have been around on the .org recently and inspect your ground points. There's a number of pics to use to find the different ground locations.

That sounds like a stab in the dark by the mechanic, but you can a) inspect them for nothing and from what I understand, pretty easily and b) replace your ground wires for fairly cheap if anything looks questionable. As a car gets older, it's not a bad idea to replace 'em anyway as a preventative maintenence kind of thing. Been meaning to do it myself before winter, but havent got around to it

 

When I started it Monday morning I didn't notice anything out of the obvious and drove on to work, however when I got off work it would just crank over. It didn't even seem like it was getting any fuel or spark from the ignition. Come to think of it, if is was cranking the vehicle for a long time I would be smelling a fuel odor, but then again once I got the vehicle started the r/f could not duplicate the intermitten no start concern.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Blaximazx
[B]The other day my car would just crank but it would not start, I let the vehicle set for about an hour and tried again and it started right up!!!!!!,

I remember someone having an intermittent starting problem and they adjusted the throttle position switch to fix it. Just passing on something I read on the Forum.

 

ECT Trouble is usually a hard start on a semi warm engine, not cold.
What you could have starting to go is a crank or cam sensor. You can take them out very easily and measure each one with a simple ohm meter. If you near or below the specs on any of them, replace it. They cause hard starts when they start to go bad, and when they quit, sometimes you don't even get a CEL. Your car just wount start.

Keep that in mind.

A Haynes manual will help you with the measurements.

 

Thanks for that info, I will look into checking both the crankshaft sensor and the camshaft sensor later this week. I'll post the results once i have tested both sensors. THX