Experts Facilitate Tech OQ & A at ERA Show Part I Alan Melton of Northwest Regulator once again moderated the roundtable discussion at the annual Electrical Rebuilder’s Association Trade Show last month in Grand Rapids, Mich. He was joined by rebuilder Ken Plourde of Guy’s Auto Electric, and instructor Joe Davis of Joe Davis Enterprises, along with approximately 50 other rebuilders and suppliers. The following is a sum- mary of the morning’s discussion: Question from Ron Waldier/ Power-Pro Auto Electric: “Recently, I was rebuilding a Delco 37MT starter and had a problem that is still unsolved. Bench testing the starter it had signifi- cantly more power and torque, bypass- ing the solenoid —if I tested the unit through the solenoid, it drew more amps and turned slower, changing solenoids (three times) did not help, adjusting the solenoid plunger also did not help.” Reply: 37MT is all it says, that would most likely be 12 volts, wouldn’t it? Waldier: No. All three switches were not the same brand. Reply: Were any of them OEM? Waldier: No; closest of the three that would have been OEM was an Accurate. Reply: Was it losing voltage? Waldier: Yes, it was losing voltage across the contacts and the solenoid. Reply: Just recently on the forum postings, I’m not sure if it was ours or not, there was a comment about a bump inside the solenoid that was restricting the ability of the plunger to move and after this poster had looked at a variety A long standing tradition at the ERA Show, this Saturday morning roundtable discussion was the first to be recorded for publication. Not to be outdone, Grand Rapids show planners packed a lot of meat into the 2008 trade show, starting with the Joe Davis ERA Tech Ed Seminars. of solenoids he found that some brands did not have a bump in there and there was some conversation about that in terms of the fact that it was actually restricting the plunger’s ability to travel and binding the plunger up. Reply: Get on the ERE Web site and if you don’t know how get hold of some- body because you can sort and query on the forum and it is our forum, because I remember seeing it and that’s the only one I look at. It’s on there— all you have to do is enter 37MT and it should bring it up…you might have to enter 41 MT. Reply: I believe on the forum it was the cap that was the culprit. There was a little bump on the cap that wouldn’t allow the solenoid to sit down right and it would cause the plunger to bind in the bore. But I’ve never run into it myself. Reply: There was another one other than that I remember also because unfor- tunately they had to end up using an OEM switch but I’m not necessarily in favor of doing that… but it was what took ed care of the problem. And we’ve had this problem recently that was in the same family of starters that you’re discussing here and I cannot tell you what it was but all we did was change the switch on there and I changed the manufacturer of the switch that I was using and it corrected it on one particular starter that we had. Reply: Since we’re talking about the 37MTs, a couple of years ago I ran across a problem with a 5OMT and I posted the information — actually it was in the ERE paper and it was about the angle of the shift fork in the SOMT starter, SOMT and 4OMT shift work should be the same, however they’re not. And long story short, whoever is making the shift levers didn’t have the angle bent right and the shift fork was hitting the center housing, not allow- ing the drive to come out all the way and making the solenoid click. And when you laid the right shift fork on top of the wrong shift fork it was real obvious that this was the problem and that was all in the ERE papers. So something people should notice and a real simple thing to find it was when there was no drive in it and you pulled the shift fork out all the way it would not even go past the opening on the end of the center housing. Reply: And you can search for that information in the Web site also. You can go to the newspaper icon and open up the newspaper and do a search in the newspa- per archives and it will bring up all the articles related to SOMT. You just put in SOMT or 37MT and every printed word or document that has those words in it will come up and it’s an amazing amount