I'll give a quick run down of whats been going on: 99 5spd, supercharged, the engine is pretty beat and has a blown head gasket on the front bank (a new engine is going in soon) and has had some starting problems recently. The starter cranks but it wont turn the engine over, just randomly started one day and has not started since. Before it stopped starting all together, it was hard to restart the engine after a period of driving, it would take maybe 10 seconds of cranking to get it going.Today I changed the coil packs, and tried to start it and it seemed to have fried the started because it just clicks and a little bit of smoke started coming out from the starter.

Here's problem 2: the screw on the ecu to run the codes is gone, the previous owner must have turned it too many times or something I do not know, but its gone. So I am not able to pull codes off the ecu. I have a handheld scanner, and it says no codes found each time I plug it in, so thats getting me no where.


I dont know a lot about starters, is that the sign of a starter going bad or did it blow due to the coilpacks somehow? I have a spare one that I'm going to swap in but I could use some ideas from others too.

Sorry its so long!

 

Sounds like your starter. That bad boy has to crank close to 100% of its factory speed/power to "properly" turn over the big-*** VQ. Clicking and smoke from it? Gotta be it. Proper rebuilt under $100 usually...

 

I know the starter is bad, but I was more concerned with the fact that I just changed the coil packs, and then the starter immediatly blew on the first start attempt with the new coils.

 

Perhaps if you rebuild it yourself you can do it for under $100.00, but Autozone and Auto Barn sell the Duralast reman for $129.00, the Bosch is $142.00 and the Denso reman is $236.00.

 

coils and starters are competely unrelated unless you continually tried to start the car with your bad coil packs and burned out the starter.

 

I know they are unrelated and it doesnt make any sense which is why I asked. New coilpacks, first attempt to start and poof there goes the starter. Just coincidence I guess.

 

replace starter, very simple job. Problem solved!