Chattering starter at startup... Need advice on problem

check your battery and all connection's i mean take them off and clean them + & -

if it's zingging instead of chattering its your starter solinoid

starter solenoid or battery is a good place to start (no pun intended)

OLd question. Same old answers will do. I suggest you Google it. If it's trying to engage and not, then chances are you are doing damage to the flex plate/ring gear. I'd be pulling the starter and looking at the teeth, fixing them, and probably installing a replacement starter.

It could be a bad starter. Then again, maybe not. You will have to determine that.

The chatter is caused by poor battery, solenoid, ground or starter connections. As the solenoid begins to feed current to the starter, the large current draw causes a voltage drop at the solenoid's coil and it releases; the release restores the voltage and it closes again. This happens pretty fast and creates a rattling sound. The voltage drop is due to the resistance in some rotten connection, usually at the battery itself, and sometimes you can clean the battery terminals and it will still happen because there's corrosion inside the cable clamp itself, around the wire. A mechanic can often locate the bad spot using a voltmeter set on a low voltage scale and reading the voltage across connections while someone cranks the starter. A bad battery connection, for instance, will show a voltage between the positive battery post and the clamp on that same post, proving that there's some resistance between the two that doesn't belong there. Check both posts, the ground terminal on the engine, and the battery cable at the solenoid. Make sure the starter is properly bolted to the block.

Dan

I took just about all of the advice posted and did the following:

- checked state of charge of the battery

- cleaned battery posts and connections

- checked ground and starter connections

After I did the above, I found that the starter still chattered. So.... having read one of the posts which warned that the constant hammering of the starter pinion could ruin the ring gear, I decided to change out the starter pronto. I bought it for a 100 bucks at O'Reilly and it worked like a charm. Thanks for all of the helpful advice.

Al Kondo