Auto electricians

Assume abot £60 per hour at local dealersip £40.00 per hour independant

If you know it is an earth fault then just make a new one. If you're guessing, however...

A new what? Earth fault? Car? :)

No, I'm fairly certain it's an earth fault, just can't find it.. it's intermittent and doesn't happen too often.

Peter.

A new earth. ;-)

Then as I said just provide a new one. Most usual types to fail are those provided for things like taillights where to save assembly time the taillight fixing also doubles as the earth. So there is poor clamping and only one contact path between body and terminal - where they touch. A decent earth will clamp to both sides of the body panel - something like a nut and bolt or rivet.

:)

Hmm... Yes, going to be something like that or something earthing when it shouldn't? The symptoms are that sometimes the dashboard switches off while driving and sometimes it doesn't start for the first few tries (clicking from relay but no movement from starter motor). Sometimes these faults occur at the same time (dashboard dies so they pull over and try to restart it, which doesn't work).

Haven't yet been able to have a look at it while the problems are occurring so it's very hard to diagnose ;) There's probably a pattern to these faults but I haven't been able to extract that information from the driver ;)

Peter.

If it has a basic starter circuit with no immobiliser for that I'd guess you have two faults. The relay you're hearing should be sending current to the starter circuit which will have its own heavy duty relay. So shouldn't be too hard to trace. It's unlikely the heavy duty relay in the starter would share an earth with the dash. However, if it has an immobiliser it's possible that comes between the relay you're hearing and the starter.

Big snag is that unless it's a known fault(s) an electrician could spend a lot of time trying to find it or them.

It's the old model Corsa (51 reg) and I think it does have an immobiliser, I'll check that. How do modern immobilisers work, do they interrupt power to the ECU as well as the starter and when they stop the starter working is it in the feed to the starter or the feed to the relay (hence not needing to get in the way of hundreds of amps)? If the immobiliser wasn't working and normally works by stopping the relay closing then presumably there wouldn't have been any clicking when they tried to start it.

Hence me asking how much it would cost for half a day to a days work. I'm a bit hesitant to recommend doing that given that there's a risk an electrician will spend a day working on it and not find the fault! I guess I should make that risk clear ;)

Thanks,

Peter.