Golf cart "starter" issue...

[ralph III]

Hello All,
I just hired into a maintenance position and wanted to join this forum in getting help with some golf cart issues. We have a dozen or so carts most of which are quite old. I like to research and troubleshoot things whereas the established seem to wing it and hope for the best at times, so it seems. I hope to get some answers for a few plaguing issues and in implementing some better maintenance practices...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ISSUE AT HAND: One of our large gas powered "people movers" died the other day, I think it's a club car. We looked for a few obvious things (burned wire) but all seemed fine and you could hear the solenoid getting power. We narrowed it down to a bad starter and replaced it with an old/used looking starter on the shelf. It tested good when hooked directly to battery whereas the dead one wouldn't.

Anyhow, that seemed to fix the issue as the golf cart started and ran perfectly afterward. However, the exact same thing happened again late the following day. Again, it appears to be the starter?

1) The replacement starter may have been bad to begin with as my supervisor didn't know the history of it. The odds of two starters going bad is quite high to me though but if it had an issue to begin with, maybe that is why it was sitting on the shelf?

2) Is there something else which could have gone bad and now be burning up the starters? Maybe they are getting too much current or something? How do we test for such?


Thanks,
Ralph