Started the car just fine this afternoon. Now, I turn the key, everything's fine until I turn it all the way to engage the starter. Then everything electrical fails. Nothing at all works. If I let it sit a couple minutes, I can go through the same cycle all over again.

The car is a '79, manual tranny. The starter looks fairly new. I checked the wiring and all is connected. The starter is firmly in place, not loose at all. Replaced the main fusable link, no difference.

I've never seen this before. Any ideas, anyone?

 

Clean off your battery cables at both the battery, and the starter. Trust me on this...

 

GROUND IT - Make sure that negative cable is tight and clean-

 

Yep, check your battery cables and the starter ground. That should fix the problem.

 

If the wire cleanup doesn't help, I had the small starter wire break about 18 inches away from the starter, check the wire is in good shape.

 

Probably a bad battery cable or connection. The OEM aluminum cables are suspicious and could stand replacement with copper cables, but most likely it's a corroded or loose connector.

I haven't had this problem on a 7, but with other cars I used a voltmeter to look around for a voltage drop across cables and connectors. As little as 1/2 volt may kill a starter, tho usually you look for 1.5 volts.

 

I checked all the grounds and they were clean and tight. The battery negative cable was new. So I took a battery positive nearly-new cable from the parts car. That took care of the problem. Thanks for the advice.